Ed Madden will be reading from his latest book of poetry, Prodigal: Variations. Reading and book signing.

The poems in Ed Madden's second collection of poetry, Prodigal: Variations, explore relations between men--fathers, sons, brothers, lovers--as well as questions of home and exile, memory and longing, and the promises and compromises of any return. In poems that are at once both mythical and deeply personal, Madden asks how we define home, what stories impel us, what rituals and relationships sustain us in a world shaped by loss

Madden's first book of poetry, Signals, won the 2007 South Carolina Poetry Book Prize. His work also appears in Best New Poets 2007, Collective Brightness, and Notre Dame's The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present. Madden is an associate professor of English at the University of South Carolina, where he teaches Irish literature, creative writing, and gender studies. Madden received his MA and PhD from the University of Texas.