Join us for this Author’s Toolbox with poet Ed Madden at 7 p.m. Thursday, April 17 via Zoom. (Link provided upon registration.)

Looking at recent poems and songs about identity and belonging, we'll think about how a poem can be a kind of vow of belonging, a pledge of allegiance to a community – as small as friendship or family, as large as nation. How do we write ourselves into (or out of) communities? How can poems help us heal, realize, understand?

About Ed Madden:

Ed Madden served as Columbia’s poet laureate from 2015 to 2023.  An English professor and director of the women’s and gender studies program at the University of South Carolina, Madden is the author of four books of poetry: Signals, which won the 2007 SC Poetry Book Prize; Prodigal: Variations; Nest; and Ark.  He is An Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow and the recipient of a South Carolina Governor’s Award for the Arts. A proponent of public art, Madden has placed poems on Columbia’s sidewalks and buses. On April Fool’s Day, he put 2,000 fake parking tickets with poems on people’s cars.