August Open Mic, Featuring Ed Madden, Author of A Pooka in Arkansas

In partnership with the South Carolina Writers Association and the Beaufort County Black Chamber of Commerce, the Conroy Center’s monthly Open Mic Night will be held at Sandies (711 Bladen St.) on Thursday, August 10, from 6:00 to 7:30 p.m. Our featured writer is Ed Madden, past Poet Laureate of Columbia and author of the newly published collection A Pooka in Arkansas

Interested in reading as part of Open Mic? Let us know at contact@patconroyliterarycenter.org.

About Our Featured Writer
Ed Madden is the author of four other books and four chapbooks of poetry, most recently Ark, about his father’s last months in hospice care, and So they can sing, which won the 2016 Robin Becker Chapbook Prize. He is a professor of English and the former director of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina, where he teaches Irish literature, queer studies, and creative writing. From 2015 through 2022, Ed has served as the poet laureate for the City of Columbia, SC. He is recipient of an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship and artist residencies at the Hambidge Center in Georgia and the Instituto Sacatar in Itaparica, Brazil.

“This book redeems the curse of where and what we are born into by conjuring spells. Bestial. Animistic. The poet strutting around like a mythic centaur, or if you like, a domestic ass. This book flies in the face of making the rough places plain and the crooked straight. You won’t have to have grown up queer in the deep rural South to be touched by the lyrical antics that go on here, this alternative gospel spreading its haunches till every knee bow, every tongue confess, this chorus of Hallelujah inflected/infected by its own down and dirty twang.”—Timothy Liu