David Madden will be the featured author at UT’s Writers in the Library on Monday, November 12th, 7 p.m. in the Hodges Library auditorium. The reading is free and open to the public.

A novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, and critic, Madden is a prolific writer in all genres. His novels include Cassandra Singing, Bijou, The Suicide’s Wife, Abducted by Circumstance, and Sharpshooter: A Novel of the Civil War. His latest book, London Bridge in Plague and Fire, brings to life the Old London Bridge, which began construction in 1176 and was eventually dismantled in 1834. In the novel, a young poet who lives on the bridge uses his imagination to resurrect the bridge’s architect and the life of the bridge itself, which was one of the wonders of the world.

Madden has compiled and edited numerous collections of stories and is the author of academic volumes on James M. Cain, James Agee, and Carson McCullers. His stories have been reprinted in college textbooks and twice in Best American Short Stories. His best-known novel, The Suicide’s Wife, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and made into a CBS movie. He may also be familiar to students of creative writing for his Pocketful series on fiction, poetry, drama, and essays.

David Madden is a Knoxville native and a graduate of the University of Tennessee. He earned an M.A. at San Francisco State and attended Yale Drama School on a John Golden Fellowship. Writer-in-residence at Louisiana State University from 1968 to 1992, Director of the Creative Writing Program 1992-1994, Founding Director of the United States Civil War Center 1992-1999, he is now LSU Robert Penn Warren Professor of Creative Writing, Emeritus.

The author will also hold an informal Q&A session for all interested students, 3-4 p.m., Monday, November 12th, in 115 Humanities and Social Sciences Building.

Read a review of London Bridge in Plague and Fire at Chapter 16: a community of Tennessee writers, readers and passersby (brought to you by Humanities Tennessee).

Writers in the Library is sponsored by the University of Tennessee, Knoxville Libraries and the UT Creative Writing Program in association with the John C. Hodges Better English Fund. For further information contact Marilyn Kallet, Director, UT Creative Writing Program (mkallet@utk.edu), or Christopher Hebert, Writer-in-Residence, UT Libraries (chebert3@utk.edu).

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