Tonya Foster

Tonya M. Foster is a New Orleaninan living in California. She is an Assistant Professor in Writing & Literature and in Graduate Writing at California College of the Arts. A poet and essayist, she is the author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court (Belladonna*, 2015), the bilingual chapbook La Grammaire des Os (joca seria, 2016), and is a co-editor of Third Mind: Creative Writing through Visual Art (Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 2002). She is currently a poetry editor at Fence Magazine, and a member of the poetry and fiction collective at African-American Review. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Callaloo, Obsidian, Boundary2, Poetry Project Newsletter, the Harvard Review, Best American Experimental Writing, and elsewhere. Foster is a recipient of fellowships from the Ford foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Macdowell Artists Colony, the Headlands Center, New York Foundation of the Arts, the Pan-African Literary Festival, etc. She is a founding member of the new Creative Writing forum at the Modern Languages Association. The forum brings together creative writing practitioners and pedagogues to think through the teaching of creative writing in university and art school spaces.

BA, Tulane University; MFA, University of Houston; PhD, Graduate School of the City University of New York.