Prayer is a convergence of absence and will. A poem is a kind of prayer. — Dr. Tonya M. Foster

Dr. Tonya M. Foster is a poet, essayist, editor, and Black feminist scholar. Her writing and research focus on poetry, poetics, ideas of place and emplacement, and on intersections between the visual and the written. She uses all types of words in her poetry: big and small, beautiful, and vulgar. It is a key tactic of her ongoing study of language.

Every year we choose a theme to inspire us and to create new ways to grow as a community. Last year was our Year of Poetry. In 2024, we celebrate the 175^th anniversary of the founding of Grace Cathedral with the Year of Memory. Join Malcolm Clemens Young for a conversation with Foster about poetry as memory and poetry as prayer.

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Introduction to A Swarm of Bees in High Court

The Forum will be posted on our Youtube and Apple Podcast channels.   

About the Guest

Tonya M. Foster is a poet, essayist, editor, and Black feminist scholar. She is the author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court, the bilingual chapbook La Grammaire des Os, and coeditor of Third Mind: Teaching Creative Writing through Visual Art. Her writing and research focus on poetry, poetics, ideas of place and emplacement, and on intersections between the visual and the written. Forthcoming publications include the poetry collection—Thingifications (Ugly Duckling Presse), as well as a two-volume compendium on the Umbra Writers Workshop —The Umbra Galaxy (Wesleyan University Press) and an anthology of experimental creative drafts (Nightboat Books). Raised in New Orleans, she is a Louisianian from generations back on the maternal and paternal lines. Dr. Foster holds the George & Judy Marcus Endowed Chair in Poetry at San Francisco State University and is a member of an Emeryville Artists Co-op.

About the Moderator 

The Very Rev. Dr. Malcolm Clemens Young is the dean of Grace Cathedral. He is the author of The Spiritual Journal of Henry David Thoreau and The Invisible Hand in Wilderness: Economics, Ecology, and God, and is a regular contributor on religion to the Huffington Post and San Francisco Examiner.

About The Forum

The Forum is a series of stimulating conversations about faith and ethics in relation to the important issues of our day. We invite inspiring and illustrious people to sit down for a real conversation with the Forum’s host and with you. Our guests range from artists, inventors, and philosophers to pop culturists and elected officials, but the point of The Forum is singular: civil, sophisticated discourse that engages minds and hearts to think in new ways about the world.  More about Grace Forum Online.

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