Carolann Caviglia Madden is a poet, archivist, folklorist, weaver, abolition lover and 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. 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 a traditional handweaver trained at the Marshfield School of Weaving and the recent 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.

“Madden’s verse rings with a mystic’s passion and creates its own lexicon of spell casting. “begin / ready heart, begin”. These poems are not afraid to split the lark and explore its bloody chamber.”
—Desirée Alvarez

“Carolann Caviglia Madden knows how to make art from repetition, which is what it means to work and why work, and why workers, are the beginning of everything.”
—Christopher Watkins