To celebrate National Poetry Month, Catawba's English Department and the Literary Bookpost are sponsoring a poetry reading by South Carolina poet Ed Madden on Thursday, April 28th at 7 p.m. The reading will take place at the Literary Bookpost, located at 110 South Main Street in Salisbury.
Madden, an Arkansas native, is a Professor of English and Director of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina. He is the author of four books of poetry — Signals (2008), which won the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize; Prodigal: Variations (2011); Nest (2014); and, most recently, Ark (2016). His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Crazyhorse, Poetry Ireland Review, as well as in Best New Poets 2007, The Book of Irish American Poetry, and Hard Lines: Rough South Poetry, and online at the Good Men Project. He is recipient of the inaugural Carrie McCray Nickens Fellowship from the South Carolina Academy of Authors. In 2015, he was named the poet laureate for the City of Columbia, South Carolina.
Ark is a memoir in verse about terminal illness and family reconciliation.
Madden notes that Ark is a memoir in verse about terminal illness and family reconciliation. It tells the story of how he was disowned by his family after coming out and didn't speak with his father for 10 years, and how the last months he spent with his father were an extraordinary opportunity, even if also horrible and heartbreaking in dealing with cancer. Madden is also an editor of Out Loud: The Best of Rainbow Radio, published by Hub City Press of Spartanburg, which inflamed the South Carolina Legislature when the University of South Carolina Upstate used it for their first year common reading in 2014. He also has an essay in the recently released Crooked Letter, a collection of memoirs about being LGBT in the south.
Madden is also one of the authors profiled in Carolina Writers at Home, the featured book at the "Rowan Reading Rendezvous" this spring. His essay begins with being kicked out of his rental house in Columbia for being gay. Additionally, he has published two academic books, many scholarly articles, and is one of the most highly regarded teachers at the University of South Carolina.
