English professor Ed Madden wants to use the written word to help people connect to each other and to amplify voices often overlooked or ignored. It is the ethos that drives his teaching, his scholarship and especially his community service, which included eight years as the city of Columbia’s first poet laureate.
“One of the things I thought about early on when I was poet laureate was thinking about how creative writing can be a public art and how it can engage the community — using art to either make people reflect on what it means to be part of a community or just to interrupt their day in such a way that it causes them to pause and think,” says Madden, who teaches creative writing and classes in LGBTQ and Irish studies.
For his achievements in teaching, research and service, Madden was awarded the 2025 Carolina Trustees Professorship in Humanities, Social Sciences, Business and Law.
“Dr. Madden models what it means to be an outstanding scholar-teacher whose research, teaching and service mutually invigorate one another to the great benefit of undergraduates, graduate students and the entire Carolina community,” English department chair Susan Courtney wrote in support of Madden’s nomination for the award.
Madden worked on several projects during his time as the Columbia poet laureate, including summer writing workshops for middle-schoolers and high-school writing workshops in the Carolina Master Scholars summer camp programs. He put poems written by local artists on the paper sleeves of cups of coffee sold at a local shop and on sidewalks where the words appeared only when it rained. He created poetic “parking ticket” that rewarded those parking downtown rather than fining them.
“One of the things I thought about early on when I was poet laureate was thinking about how creative writing can be a public art and how it can engage the community — using art to either make people reflect on what it means to be part of a community or just to interrupt their day in such a way that it causes them to pause and think.”
More recently, Madden led a workshop for writers to engage with historic materials about LGBTQ life at Historic Columbia and University Libraries’ Special Collections.
That experience will translate into a South Carolina Honors College course on archives, art and history and informs the current book Madden is writing from the History Press Out in Columbia. It’s just one of many examples of Madden incorporating community into his lesson plans and research. He says the three pillars of professorship are so interwoven in his work that he cannot really separate them.
“I do nerdy archival research where I sit in an archive in London or in Dublin and look up letters and papers of things that happened and write about them,” he says. “But I'm also fascinated when I can do something like the queer archive project where I bring creative writers in to encounter that material, imagine something new then get that distributed in a way that creates interest in our history — who we were and where we came from.”
It is his bringing community service to the classroom that impressed history professor Mark Smith, who nominated Madden for the trustees’ award.
“Both the students at USC and the wider Columbia and South Carolina community would be terribly impoverished without his exceptional classroom teaching and remarkable public service,” Smith wrote in his nomination letter. “Most significant, in my estimation, is Professor Madden’s remarkable ability to braid his classroom teaching with public engagement.”