Tonya M. Foster was raised in New Orleans. She is the author of the bilingual chapbook La Grammaire des Os and the poetry collection A Swarm of Bees in High Court, which Stephen Burt describes as “the long-delayed American apotheosis of haiku form.” In a review, Patricia Spears Jones notes that “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.” A coeditor of Third Mind: Creative Writing through Visual Art, Foster has had work published in Best American Experimental Writing (2016), boundary2, Litscapes: Collected US Writings 2015, Callaloo, MiPoesias, Western Humanities Review, the Hat, and elsewhere.
Foster has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Graduate Center, CUNY, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, the Pan African Literary Festival, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing at the California College of the Arts.