Tonya Foster

Tonya M. Foster is a poet, essayist, editor, and Black feminist scholar. She is the author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court, the bilingual chapbook La Grammaire des Os, and coeditor of Third Mind: Teaching Creative Writing through Visual Art. Her writing and research focus on poetry, poetics, ideas of place and emplacement, and on intersections between the visual and the written. Forthcoming publications include poetry collections Thingifications (Ugly Duckling Presse) and A History of the Bitch, as well as a two-volume compendium on the Umbra Writers Workshop (Wesleyan University Press) and an anthology of experimental creative drafts (Nightboat Books). Foster's poetry and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day online journal, Callaloo, boundary2, Best American Experimental Writing, Letters to the Future: Black Women/Radical Writing, and elsewhere. As a member of the multi-disciplinary advisory committee for the exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America at MOMA in New York City, her essay for the 2021 field guide expands her meditations on place and poetics. She was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, is a Creative Capital awardee, a recipient of awards from Macdowell, Headlands Center for the Arts, NYFA, SF MOAD, the Ford and Mellon Foundations, and is a 2023 recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts' C.D. Wright Award. Dr. Foster is the George and Judy Marcus Endowed Chair in Poetry at San Francisco State University.