Conversation & Reading

Influence and In-Fluency with Tonya M. Foster, Samiya Bashir and Tracie Morris

Wed, May 7, 2025

6:30 PM–8:30 PM

Skylight Room 9100 at the CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Ave, NYC. Free and open to all. Registration required.

Poets Tonya M. Foster, Samiya Bashir and Tracie Morris

The 2024 collection Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry asks contemporary poets to consider their own lineages, influences and inspirations. Using this framing, three poets, Tonya M. Foster, Samiya Bashir and Tracie Morris will read from their work and consider how they extend their work outward and onward to writing communities and beyond. The reading and conversation will be introduced and moderated by poets and editors of Other Influences Marcella Durand and Jennifer Firestone. Books will be available at the event. Register here to attend.

Preceding the event at 4:00 pm, Tonya M. Foster will facilitate a free related writing workshop on Influence and In-Fluency, and participants will be invited to briefly share their writings at the start this event.

About the Participants

Tonya M. Foster

Tonya M. Foster is the author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court, the bilingual chapbook La Grammaire des Os; the forthcoming Thingifications::Mathematics of Chaos (Ugly Duckling Presse); and a co-editor of Third Mind: Teaching Creative Writing through Visual Art; and a co-editor of the forthcoming two-volume compendium Umbra Galaxy, Umbra Reader (Wesleyan University Press). A recipient of the 2023 C.D. Wright Award in poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Tonya is a Creative Capital Awardee and a Radcliffe Fellow. She serves as the George & Judy Marcus Endowed Chair in Poetry at San Francisco State University and is a New Orleanian raised by New Orleanians from way back.

Samiya Bashir

Samiya Bashir is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Field Theories (Nightboat, 2017), winner of the 2018 Oregon Book Awards Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry. Her fourth book, I Hope this Helps, is forthcoming in Spring 2025 from Nightboat Books. Samiya’s honors include the Rome Prize in Literature, the Pushcart Prize, Oregon’s Arts & Culture Council Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature. She currently serves as the June Jordan Visiting Scholar at Columbia University and lives in Harlem.

Tracie Morris

Tracie Morris is a multidisciplinary poet and scholar. Her latest book is human/nature poems (Litmus Press 2023). She is Professor of Poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in Iowa City, IA.

Moderators & Editors of Other Influences

Marcella Durand

Marcella Durand’s latest book, A Winter Triangle, is forthcoming September 2025 from Fordham University Press as the 2024 recipient of the Poetic Justice Institute Prize.

Jennifer Firestone

Jennifer Firestone is the author of five books of poetry including her latest collection Story by Ugly Duckling Presse. Firestone is the co-editor of two anthologies, the recently published MIT collection Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-garde Poetry (co-edited with Marcella Durand) and Letters To Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics and Community (co-edited with Dana Teen Lomax). Firestone co-authored the collection LITtle by LITtle with photographer and urban geographer, Laura Y. Liu. She is an Associate Professor of Literary Studies and Chair of Writing at the New School’s Eugene Lang College.

This event is presented by Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative from the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center.