Join us for 3rd Friday on September 18 at 6 PM, for a fun, FREE special literary program, celebrating the book launch of Penn State Professor Shara McCallum’s latest collection of poetry, BEHOLD. McCallum will be in conversation with author/poet and editor Carey Salerno, Executive Director and Publisher of Alice James Books.

This event is part of our America’s 250th Literary Celebrations series.

Born of the poet’s longstanding love of painting, BEHOLD is a bold new collection about what it means to be seen in art—and in the larger world.

BEHOLD meditates on colonization, race, and the body’s place in the world, reflecting Shara McCallum’s intentions to closely observe works of art outside the tradition of the “masters”—terminology that is especially fraught when considering work by Caribbean, Black, and women artists. By eschewing observation to engage with questions of how we interact with art, and what art reflects back to the individual viewer, BEHOLD represents a subjective response to art and identity from one of contemporary poetry’s most celebrated voices.

About the Author:

From Jamaica and born to a Jamaican father and Venezuelan mother, Shara McCallum is the author of seven books of poetry, published in the US & UK, including Behold, forthcoming in 2026. Awards for her work include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Musgrave Medal, NEA Fellowship, Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for No Ruined Stone, OCM Bocas Caribbean Poetry Prize for Madwoman, Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for The Water Between Us, among others. McCallum teaches at Penn State University and from 2021-22 served as the Penn State Laureate. 

About the Interviewer:

Carey Salerno serves as the executive director & publisher of Alice James Books where she has been dedicated to broadening the spectrum of the American poetic voice since 2008. She is the author of The Hungriest Stars (2025), Tributary (2021), Shelter (2009), and a co-editor of Lit From Inside: 40 Years of Poetry from Alice James Books (2013). She is the recipient of a 2025 Pushcart Prize and a 2025 Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Jersey State Arts Council. Salerno serves as co-chair for LitNet: The Literary Network and teaches publishing arts and poetry writing for the University of Maine.

She is a frequent guest of writing programs, conferences, and festivals where she conducts editorial consultations and delivers talks on publishing arts, editing, poetry, manuscript compilation, and other topics. You may find her essays, poems–and articles and interviews regarding her literary and publishing work–in print and online, including in NPR, Poets & Writers, and American Poetry Review.

Advance-purchase books+tickets available soon.

Preorder Book+Ticket Links coming soon!

Free RSVP and advance-purchase tickets will be available soon.

Join us on TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2026, at 7 PM to celebrate the book release of TIDAL WAVE: The Pilots, the Princess, and the Enemy Ace—A True Story of Courage and Survival in WWII by one of our all-time favorite history writers, ADAM MAKOS.

About the Book

Operation Tidal Wave produced five Medals of Honor and remains one of the costliest missions in American airpower history. But the extraordinary story that began after the bombers crashed in the foothills of Romania has never been told in full. In his new book TIDAL WAVE, Adam Makos brings that little-known aftermath vividly to life.

The Ploesti oil fields—the objective of the famous August 1, 1943 low-level B-24 raid—fueled the Axis war machine, making them one of the most strategically important targets of World War II. At a moment when energy infrastructure is once again central to global conflict, the story of how the Allies attempted to destroy “Hitler’s gas station” feels newly resonant. In TIDAL WAVE, Makos recreates the attack itself, and then shifts focus to what happened next: the fate of the American airmen shot down over Romania, and the extraordinary Romanians who chose to help them.

At the center of the story is Lt. Ernie Poulson, a young B-24 copilot whose plane crash-landed on the estate of Princess Ecaterina “Catherine” Caradja. By nationality, she was his enemy; Ernie and his fellow Americans had just bombed her country. But what she did next defied every expectation. As Makos widens the lens, we meet Catherine’s cousin, Prince Constantine Cantacuzino, Romania’s top ace who fights for the other side but will ultimately face a choice to help rescue the very Americans he faced in the air, and King Michael I, the young monarch working to pull his country out from under Hitler’s grip before it’s too late.

Drawing on newly uncovered sources, family archives, diaries, letters, and firsthand accounts, TIDAL WAVE brings Makos’s signature immersive, character-driven approach to one of World War II’s most legendary air campaigns. The result is at once a combat narrative, an escape story, and a deeply human account of courage, resistance, and reconciliation—asking what happens when the person you’ve been taught to see as the enemy becomes the one willing to save you.

About the Author

Hailed by the Associated Press as “a masterful storyteller,” Adam Makos is the New York Times bestselling author of A Higher Call, Spearhead, and Devotion—now a major motion picture starring Glen Powell. The Los Angeles Times places him “in the top ranks of military writers,” a title earned through immersive research that has taken him from flying a World War II bomber to journeying into North Korea in search of a missing American aviator. You can find Adam @ AdamMakos.com.