Carolann Madden is a weaver, spinner, poet, archivist, folklorist and abolition lover. She has trained in traditional handweaving, wool processing and spinning at the Marshfield School of Weaving and has been mentored extensively by Master Weavers Norman Kennedy and Kate Smith. She continues to work under and with Kate Smith, regularly undertaking projects at the Weaver’s Croft. Madden’s craft is informed by her training in 18th and 19th century textile production in the UK and Ireland, as well as her background as a folklorist. She completed her PhD in Folklore/Ethnography and Poetry in 2021, with emphases in folklore and material culture of coastal and maritime communities, particularly in the West of Ireland, where she lives. A member of the Galway Hooker Sailing Club, she is currently working on a project to handweave and bark traditional calico Galway Hooker sailcloth. She offers work by commission and skill-sharing by request and is available to teach workshops in traditional handspinning, hand carding and wool processing, and weaving.

Madden is also a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Maynooth University. Her project, “Scenes from the West: Archiving and Interpreting the West of Ireland Through Early Home Movies, 1930-1970” is funded by Taighde Éireann/Research Ireland and she is also a postdoctoral researcher on the AHRC/IRC funded project, Women in Focus: Developing a Feminist Approach to Film Archive Metadata and Cataloguing. She writes, translates and publishes poetry and her poetry collection, Ritual Loss (forthcoming, Omnidawn, 2026), was chosen by Desirée Alvarez for Omnidawn’s 2024 1st/2nd Poetry Book Prize. A recent winner of the Inprint Verlaine Prize for Poetry judged by Gabrielle Calvocoressi she is also the recipient of a Fulbright Ireland Research Grant. You can find a growing exhibit of her archival research, entitled ThiarWest, on www.thiarwest.com. She lives in Galway, Ireland.