Pat Madden

Patrick Madden has been teaching at BYU for 22 years. In that time, he's written so many essays, and lots of them are collected in four books with hard-to-pronounce names: Quotidiana (2010), Sublime Physick (2016), Disparates (2020), and his latest, out just this semester, Recenses/Recencies (2026). He does other stuff in the creative nonfiction world, like editing the journal Fourth Genre and the 21st Century Essays book series and vice-presiding over the NonfictioNOW conference. Brian Doyle received no compensation when he said exuberantly, "I do not know of anyone else in America who does more to celebrate, advocate, support, preserve, stimulate, and bang the drum for the essay than Pat Madden. Really and truly, no exaggeration, no hyperbole."