Patrick Madden

Profile

Patrick Madden is the author of three essay collections, Disparates (Nebraska, 2020), Sublime Physick (Nebraska, 2016) and Quotidiana (2010). His books have won Foreword Reviews and Independent Publisher book of the year awards, and have been finalists for the PEN Center USA Literary Award and the CLMP Firecracker Award. His fourth essay collection, Recenses/Recencies, is forthcoming.

His personal essays, nominated for four Pushcart Prizes and noted in The Best American Essays ten times, have been published widely in such journals as Fourth Genre, Hotel Amerika, the Iowa Review, McSweeney’s, the Normal School, River Teeth, and Southwest Review, and have been anthologized in Brief Encounters, The Best Creative Nonfiction, and The Best American Spiritual Writing. He co-translated Eduardo Milán’s Selected Poems, and, with David Lazar, he co-edited After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover the Essays and now co-edits the 21st Century Essays series at Ohio State University Press. He is also, since 2019, co-editor of Fourth Genre and vice president of the NonfictioNOW conference.

After growing up in New Jersey and Louisiana, he received his bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Notre Dame and his PhD in creative nonfiction from Ohio University. During his doctoral studies, he and his family lived in Montevideo, Uruguay, with a Fulbright Fellowship, which allowed him to investigate Uruguayan culture and history, and interview former Tupamaro revolutionaries for an essay about their 1971 Guinness World Record prison escape. In fall 2012, the Maddens returned to Uruguay with another Fulbright, as he finished his second book and began writing a series of travel essays. In 2016 he was awarded a Howard Foundation Fellow. He curates an online anthology and essay resource at www.quotidiana.org.