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 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 (Teachers & Writers) and of The Umbra Galaxy, a two-volume compendium on the Umbra Writers Workshop, forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press. Her poetry collection thingifications is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse. She is co-editing an anthology of drafts. A recipient of a research fellowship from the Radcliffe institute, the 2023 C.D. Wright award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, awards from 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) who lives in a community of Bay Area Louisiana transplants. 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.