Raised in New Orleans, a Louisianian from generations back on the maternal and paternal lines, Tonya M. Foster is a poet, essayist, editor, and Black feminist scholar. She's 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 , (Teachers & Writers) and of the forthcoming The Umbra Galaxy, a two-volume compendium on the Umbra Writers Workshop (Wesleyan University Press). Her poetry collection thingifications::a mathematics of chaos is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse. She is co-editing an anthology of drafts. A recipient of fellowships and awards from the Radcliffe institute, the 2023 C.D. Wright award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Creative Capital Foundation, NYFA, San Francisco MoAD,  the Emily Harvey foundation, Headlands Center for the Arts, Macdowell, and Djerassi, among others, Tonya is a transplanted southerner (with the varied ramifications of that) who lives in the Bay Area. Dr. Foster holds the George & Judy Marcus Endowed Chair in Poetry at SFSU where she's established Undisciplining the Fields: Study, Performance, and (Re:)Creation, a conversation (and sometimes performance) series that invites writers, artists, filmmakers, and scholars into creative conversation and collaboration. She is the newest member of a 50-year old Emeryville Artists Co-op, and the newest co-leader of the SFSU Poetry Center.