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Tonya M. Foster is Associate Professor and the George and Judy Marcus Endowed Chair in Poetry in the Department of English at San Francisco State University, within the College of Liberal & Creative Arts. She is a distinguished poet, essayist, and Black feminist scholar with a national and international presence in experimental literature and interdisciplinary arts.
Her research interests include poetry, poetics, Black feminist theory, creative writing, and the intersections between the visual and the written. She deeply explores ideas of place, emplacement, and cultural memory, particularly in relation to New Orleans and the African diaspora. Her work often engages with Black aesthetics, displacement, and the experimental use of language.
Her recent publications span poetry and critical prose, with a focus on innovative forms and interdisciplinary inquiry. Themes across her latest works include memory, identity, surveillance, and the poetics of home. Her writing frequently appears in venues such as the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Callaloo, boundary2, and The Harvard Review, reflecting her influence in contemporary literary discourse.
- Lisa Goldberg Fellow, Radcliffe Institute (2020–2021)
- Creative Capital Awardee
- Fellow, Macdowell Colony
- Fellow, Headlands Center for the Arts
- Recipient of support from Ford, Mellon, and NYFA
Dr. Foster has served as a poetry editor for Fence Magazine and The African-American Review, and was a member of the advisory committee for the MoMA exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America. She has received grants supporting the development of new works, including a 2020 Creative Capital grant for Monkey Talk. While formal advisees are not listed, her role as thesis reader and faculty chair indicates active mentorship in graduate education. She has previously taught at California College of the Arts.
Her creative and scholarly work is deeply collaborative and place-based. She has been artist-in-residence at Headlands and Macdowell, where she worked on projects such as A Mathematics of Chaos, integrating family archives, video, and poetry to explore New Orleans’ cultural history. Her ongoing projects continue to interrogate race, aesthetics, and narrative form in innovative ways.
