Fresh & Best: Farid Matuk & Tonya Foster

DIESEL, A Bookstore welcomes Farid Matuk and Tonya Foster to the store on Monday, March 27th at 7pm as part of a Special Edition FRESH AND BEST poetry reading series.

Farid Matuk is the author of This Isa Nice Neighborhood (Letter Machine) and, most recently, of the chapbook My Daughter La Chola (Ahsahta). He serves on the editorial team at Fence, on the board of the conference Thinking Its Presence: Race & Creative Writing, and on the MFA faculty at the University of Arizona. With the support of a New Works Grant from the Headlands Center for the Arts, Matuk is currently at work on two books of poems that in their distinct ways consider the question with which Orlando Patterson’s ended 1982’s Slavery and Social Death: “must we challenge our conception of freedom and the value we place upon it?”

Tonya Foster was born in Bloomington, Illinois, and raised in New Orleans. She is the author of the poetry collection A Swarm of Bees in High Court (Belladonna*, 2015) and coedited the book Third Mind: Creative Writing through Visual Art (2002). Her work has appeared in Callaloo, MiPoesias, Western Humanities Review, the Hat, and elsewhere. Foster has received fellowships from New York Foundation for the Arts, the Macdowell Colony, the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Graduate Center, CUNY. She has taught at Bard College, Queens College CUNY, Baruch College CUNY, and she currently is an assistant professor at California College of the Arts.