Ed Madden

Ed Madden (born 1963) is an American poet, activist, and Director of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina. Much of his scholarship has focused on Irish queer literature and culture.

Early and personal life Madden grew up on a family farm near Newport, Arkansas, He got his B.A. from nearby Harding University, and received his Ph.D. in literature from the University of Texas, Austin. Madden came to realize he was gay while attending these two schools.

Career

Academia Madden is a professor of English. He has written several critical articles on modern British and Irish poetry and has completed a book on representations of Tiresian liminality in modernist poetry (Tiresian Poetics: Modernism, Sexuality, Voice, 1888-2001 from Fairleigh Dickinson University Press). He co-edited (with Marti Lee) Irish Studies: Geographies and Genders, also co-edited an anthology of essays and poems on male experience, The Emergence of Man into the 21st Century, and wrote "An Open Letter to My Christian Friends," which appears in various textbooks, including Everything's an Argument. Madden has undertaken extensive research on the Irish writer Colm Ó Clúbhán and hosted a Boston College Ireland symposium on Ó Clúbhán in 2017.

In addition to his literary criticism, he also publishes on issues involving sexuality and spirituality. He has published "Gospels of Inversion: Literature, Scripture, Sexology" in a collection of essays entitled Divine Aporia: Postmodern Conversation About the Other (edited by John C. Hawley). Another intervention in the intersection of religion, literature, and sex came in the essay "'The Well of Loneliness', or the Gospel According to Radclyffe Hall," published in Reclaiming the Sacred: The Bible in Gay and Lesbian Culture (edited by Raymond-Jean Frontain).

Poetry Madden has published multiple collections of poetry. His 2016 collection, Ark, is based on his 2011 return to Arkansas to care for his ailing father, who had never accepted Madden's gay identity. including a poem written in the aftermath of the Charleston church shooting in 2015. His 2026 chapbook, I Asked Him What He Needed, contains poems written in respond to national politics, and immigration policy and ICE operations in particular.

In 2022, Madden received the Governor’s Awards for the Arts in the Individual category.

In 2025, Madden was awarded the 2025 Carolina Trustees Professorship in Humanities, Social Sciences, Business and Law "for his achievements in teaching, research and service."

Publications

Academic books

Articles

Republished in

Chapters

Poetry collections

Signals (2009)

Chapbooks

Runner-up for the 2011 Robin Becker Chapbook Prize