Tonya Foster is an essayist and poet based in the Bay Area, CA. Her full-length poetry collection, A Swarm of Bees in High Court was published by Belladonna* in 2015, the same year that she became an Assistant Professor at California College of the Arts. In 2016, Foster’s bilingual chapbook La Grammaire des Os was published by joca seria on the occasion of a three-city tour in France. For a time, Foster’s creative practice involved completing a dissertation, with a few noted exceptions: a presentation at the University of Pittsburgh’s CAAPP center in collaboration with architect Mabel Wilson, readings at CalArts, Otis College, DIA Art Foundation Chelsea, and the Lévy Gorvy Gallery on the occasion of a Diane Arbus exhibit. For the Gorvy reading, Foster began a long epistolary poem to her eight year old nieces’ future selves. A poetry editor at Fence Magazine, and a member of the poetry and fiction editing collective at The African-American Review, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Callaloo, Obsidian, Boundary2, Poetry Project Newsletter, The Harvard Review, Best American Experimental Writing, Letters to the Future: Black Women/Radical Writing, and elsewhere.