Tonya Foster

Tonya M. Foster is the author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court, and the bilingual chapbook La Grammaire des Os; A History of the Bitch (Sputnik and Fizzle, forthcoming 2020); and co-editor of Third Mind: Creative Writing through Visual Art. Her writing and research focus on ideas of place and emplacement, and on intersections between the visual and the written. She is an editor at Fence Magazine and at The African-American Review. Her poetry, prose, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Callaloo, Tripwire, boundary2, MiPOESIAS, NYFA Arts Quarterly, the Poetry Project Newsletter, and elsewhere. Foster is a recipient of awards and fellowships from the Ford and the Mellon Foundations, from New York Foundation for the Arts; and has been an Artist-in-Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts and at the Macdowell colony. Her next collections  are a double-sided cross-genre collection on New Orleans—A Mathematics of Chaos ::Thingification (forthcoming from Ugly Presse 2021); and Monkey Talk, a cross-genre series about race, paranoia, aesthetics, and surveillance, the development of which is supported by a 2020 grant from the Creative Capital Foundation. Foster is the George and Judy Marcus Endowed Chair in Poetry at San Francisco State University.  She was raised in New Orleans, and her family goes way back in Louisiana.