History.Memory.Story.
Sara Madden is a historian, anthropologist, archaeologist-in-training, author, and storyteller exploring the people, objects, and histories traditional narratives too often overlook.
Through nonfiction, fiction, children's literature, historical research, and public storytelling, she asks what survives when people—and their stories—are in danger of being forgotten.
Because memory is a form of care.
Recover.Remember.Retell.
Recover. The histories pushed to the margins. Women whose ideas disappeared from the record. Caretakers who tended the dead after battle. Children, healers, civilians, makers, and ordinary people whose lives complicate the histories we think we know.
Remember. The things we carry forward. A stone. A letter. A vessel. An object behind museum glass. Material culture preserves stories long after voices disappear—and sometimes reveals what written records cannot.
Retell. Familiar stories through a different lens. Historical fiction, rewoven fairy tales, young adult novels, and books for children transform research into story, inviting readers of every age to encounter history—and one another—with greater curiosity and empathy.
Books that begin conversations
Sara Madden's books aren't meant simply to be finished and shelved. They are invitations to notice, question, remember, and talk.
Explore reader guides, classroom resources, discussion questions, activities, historical context, and downloadable materials created to carry each book beyond its final page.
Bring history into the room. Sara is available for conferences, classrooms, libraries, museums, universities, book clubs, conventions, workshops, readings, panel discussions, and media conversations. Her programs explore hidden histories, women's history, war beyond the battlefield, material memory, museum objects and cultural heritage, historical storytelling, and the process of turning research into compelling stories. Invite Sara.
Bring History Into the Room
The Storyteller's Desk
History becomes meaningful when we have the opportunity to question it together.
Sara offers lectures, seminars, workshops, classroom visits, author conversations, and community programs exploring hidden histories, women's history, archaeology and material culture, war beyond the battlefield, museum objects and cultural heritage, historical memory, research, and storytelling.
Programs are available for colleges and universities, community education, museums, libraries, historical organizations, conferences, schools, book clubs, writing groups, and other communities of curious learners.
Where research, memory, and story meet.
The Storyteller's Desk is where Sara writes beyond the books—following footnotes, asking questions, revisiting familiar histories, considering the objects people leave behind, and exploring the unexpected places where research leads.
Because memory is a form of care.
History does not survive simply because something happened.
It survives because someone remembered.
Someone wrote it down.
Someone kept the object.
Someone told the story.
Someone asked another question.
That's where my work begins.
Follow my podcast!
A podcast about the things we carry
What can an ordinary object remember?
In My Pocket explores the things people carry, keep, inherit, lose, bury, recover, and refuse to leave behind—and the stories those objects preserve.
Drawing from history, archaeology, material culture, memory, and everyday life, each episode begins with something small and follows where it leads.
