• Tonya Foster
• San Francisco State University

Tonya M. Foster is the author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court (Belladonna*), and the bilingual poetry chapbook La Grammaire des Os (joca seria). She is co-editor of the essay collection Third Mind: Teaching Creative Writing through Visual Art (Teachers & Writers Collaborative). Forthcoming are a poetry chapbook, AHotB, and the collection, Thingifications, from Ugly Duckling Presse. Foster’s Monkey Talk, a multi-media, multi-genre project on race, paranoia, aesthetics, and surveillance, is in development with the support of a 2020 Creative Capital Foundation grant. Foster holds the George and Judy Marcus Endowed Chair in Poetry at San Francisco State University.

A poet, essayist, and Black feminist scholar, Foster’s writing and research focus on ideas of place and emplacement, on intersections between the visual and the written, and on mapping the 21st century African-Americas. Foster is a poetry editor at Fence Magazine. Over the years, her scholarly and creative works have been supported by grants and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute @ Harvard University, the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY where she received a PhD in English, specializing in African American literature. An MFA graduate of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program, Dr. Foster is also a recipient of honors and residencies from New York Foundation for the Arts, MacDowell, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Pan-African Literary Festival.

Speaking In:

• Creative and Curatorial Playgrounds of Black Interiority