Thens & Nows & Laters: The Poet / The Poem Space-Time Calculations/Locations

“A language is a dialect with an army and navy” (Weinrich). Now is certainly a time for tending to dialects that survive (barely) (and have survived) without martial armaments. This talk will think through the ways that poets contend with what June Jordan identifies as “community intelligence” encoded in dialects.

Tonya M. Foster is a poet, essayist and Black womanist scholar, the author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court, the bilingual chapbook La Grammaire des Os; the forthcoming Thingifications::Mathematics of Chaos (Ugly Duckling Presse); and a co-editor of Third Mind: Teaching Creative Writing through Visual Art; and the forthcoming two-volume compendium Umbra Galaxy, Umbra Reader (Wesleyan University Press). A recipient of the 2023 CD Wright Award in poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Tonya is also a Creative Capital Awardee, a NYFA fellow, a Radcliffe Fellow, and a recipient of awards from the Mellon and Ford Foundations. She serves as the George & Judy Marcus Endowed Chair in Poetry at San Francisco State University, a potential co-director of the San Francisco Poetry Center. A New Orleanian raised by New Orleanians going generations way back in Louisiana, she lives in an artist co-op Emeryville, CA.