by Shara McCallum (Author)
No Ruined Stone is a verse sequence rooted in the life of 18th-century Scottish poet Robert Burns. In 1786, Burns arranged to migrate to Jamaica to work on a slave plantation, a plan he ultimately abandoned. Voiced by a fictive Burns and his fictional granddaughter, a "mulatta" passing for white, the book asks: what would have happened had he gone?
Author Biography
From Jamaica, Shara McCallum is the author of six books published in the US & UK, her most recent being No Ruined Stone, a speculative account of Scottish poet Robert Burns' planned migration to Jamaica to work on a slave plantation. Her previous book, Madwoman, received the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry and the 2018 Motton Book Prize from the New England Poetry Club. McCallum is a professor of English at Penn State University and on the faculty of the Pacific University Low-Residency MFA Program