Madison Godfrey

Madison Godfrey is a writer, educator and emotional feminist who lives on Whadjuk Noongar land with a rescue cat named ‘Sylvia’. Maddie’s first book How To Be Held (Burning Eye Books, 2018) is a manifesto to tenderness.

At 25, they have performed poetry at The Sydney Opera House, The Royal Albert Hall, St Paul’s Cathedral and Glastonbury Festival (2017). Maddie is the recipient of the 2020 Kat Muscat Fellowship, the 2021 Tom Collins Poetry Prize and the “Creative Contributions” category at the 2021 WA Youth Awards. Recently, they were awarded writer-in-residency with the National Trust of Western Australia and a mid-career fellowship with Westerly Magazine. They have a series of hybrid prose poems, which explore the reaching qualities of queer desire and longing, forthcoming in Westerly 66.1.

Madison is currently writing a prose poetry PhD about rehearsed choreographies of womanhood, teaching ‘Creative Writing’ and ‘Cultural Studies’, and wearing a lot of purple.