Tonya Foster in conversation with Ronaldo V. Wilson, as part of the George and Judy Marcus Chair in Poetry Reading, presented in collaboration with The Poetry Center and San Francisco State University.

Conversations: Power Forged, the Fall Living Writers theme, features poets, novelists, academics, curators, and artists in conversation with one another, in person, across genre and media to open up a space between them, and all of us, within dialogue, collaboration, politics, intimacy and difference which poet and activist Audre Lorde describes as that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged. Between legacies, institutions, families, embodiments and homes; across race, gender, sexuality, and class, guests will explore just how. The Fall 2022 series is co-sponsored by the Center for Racial Justice.

Tonya M. Foster is a poet, essayist, and Black feminist scholar. She is the author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court, the bilingual chapbook La Grammaire des Os; and co-editor of Third Mind: Teaching Creative Writing through Visual Art. Her writing and research focus on poetry, poetics, ideas of place and emplacement, and on intersections between the visual and the written. Dr. Foster is a poetry editor at Fence Magazine and a member of the San Francisco Writers Grotto. Forthcoming publications include poetry collections—Thingifications (Ugly Duckling Presse) and AHotB (A History of the Bitch); anthologies—The Umbra Galaxy (Wesleyan University Press) (a 2-volume compendium on the Umbra Writers Workshop), and New Writing, New Flesh: An Anthology (Nightboat Books), an anthology of experimental creative drafts. Her poetry and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in Other Influences (MIT Press), New Weathers Anthology (Nightboat Books); The Difference Is Spreading: Fifty Contemporary Poets on Fifty Poems (UPenn Press); the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day online journal, Entropy Magazine, the A-Line Journal, Callaloo, boundary2, TripWire, Poetry Project Newsletter, The Harvard Review, Best American Experimental Writing, Letters to the Future: Black Women/Radical Writing, and elsewhere. She was a member of the multi-disciplinary advisory committee for the ground-breaking exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY. Her essay for the exhibition’s 2021 field guide, “Time, Memory, and Living in Shotgun Houses in the South of the South City of New Orleans,” extends her meditations on place and poetics. She is a 2021 Lisa Goldberg fellow at the Radcliffe Institute @ Harvard, a Creative Capital awardee, a recipient of awards from Macdowell, Headlands Center for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, the San Francisco Museum of the African Diaspora, and the Ford and Mellon Foundations, among others. Dr. Foster holds the George and Judy Marcus Endowed Chair in Poetry at San Francisco State University. She is a new resident in a decades old Emeryville artist’s co-operative.

Ronaldo V. Wilson, PhD, poet, interdisciplinary artist, and academic, is the author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man, winner of the Cave Canem Prize; Poems of the Black Object, winner of the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and the Asian American Literary Award in Poetry; Farther Traveler: Poetry, Prose, Other, finalist for a Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry; and Lucy 72. His latest books are Carmelina: Figures and Virgil Kills: Stories. The recipient of numerous fellowships, including Cave Canem, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Ford Foundation, Kundiman, MacDowell, The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and Yaddo, Wilson is Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at U.C. Santa Cruz, serving on the core faculty of the Creative Critical PhD Program; principal faculty member of CRES (Critical Race and Ethnic Studies); and affiliate faculty member of DANM (Digital Arts and New Media).