Jennifer Firestone and Tonya M. Foster

Jennifer Firestone is the author of five books of poetry and four chapbooks,including Story (Ugly Duckling Presse, forthcoming),Ten, (BlazeVOX [books], forthcoming), Gates & Fields (Belladonna* Collaborative), Swimming Pool(DoubleCross Press), Flashes (Shearsman Books), Holiday (Shearsman Books), Waves (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs), from Flashes and snapshot (Sona Books) and Fanimaly (Dusie Kollektiv). She co-edited (with Dana Teen Lomax) Letters to Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics and Community (Saturnalia Books) and is collaborating with Marcella Durand on a book about Feminist Avant-garde Poetics. Firestone has work anthologized in Kindergarde: Avant-Garde Poems, Plays, Songs, & Stories for Children and Building is a Process / Light is an Element: essays and excursions for Myung Mi Kim. She won the 2014 Marsh Hawk Press’ Robert Creeley Memorial Prize. Firestone is an Assistant Professor of Literary Studies at the New School’s Eugene Lang College and is also the Director of their Academic Fellows pedagogy program.

Tonya M. Foster was born in Bloomington, Illinois, and raised in New Orleans. She earned a BA from Newcomb College, Tulane University, and an MFA from the University of Houston. Foster is the author of the poetry collection A Swarm of Bees in High Court (Belladonna*, 2015) and co-edited the book Third Mind: Creative Writing through Visual Art (2002). Her work has appeared in Callaloo, MiPoesias, Western Humanities Review, the Hat, and elsewhere. In a review, Patricia Spears Jones says, “Foster’ s imaginative work glories in language’s ambiguities, discords, emotions and logic—she allows that imaginative thrall to explore race and gender and political dysfunction.”

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, where she is a PhD candidate. 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.