Foster Dickson is a writer, editor, and teacher in Montgomery, Alabama. He is the author of Closed Ranks and I Just Make People Up, the editor of Nobody’s Home, and the coordinator of the Fitzgerald Museum’s annual Literary Contest.

Foster’s work as a writer and editor has centered on subjects from the modern South, Generation X, the arts & humanities, education, and social justice, especially untold and lesser-known stories. His most recent book Faith. Virtue. Wisdom. was commissioned for the 150th anniversary of Montgomery Catholic Preparatory School, one of the state’s longest continuously operated K–12 schools. Other works include Closed Ranks: The Whitehurst Case in Post-Civil Rights Montgomery (NewSouth Books, 2018) about a police-shooting controversy in the mid-1970s and Children of the Changing South (McFarland & Co., 2011), which contains memoirs by eighteen writers and historians who grew up in the South during and after the Civil Rights movement. Earlier published books are biographical works on two often-neglected Southerners, The Life and Poetry of John Beecher (Edwin Mellen Press, 2009) and I Just Make People Up: Ramblings with Clark Walker (NewSouth Books, 2009), and a book of poetry Kindling Not Yet Split (Court Street Press, 2002). He also acted as general editor for the place-focused curriculum guide Treasuring Alabama’s Black Belt (Alabama Humanities Foundation/Auburn University at Montgomery, 2009) and wrote the curriculum guide for Alabama in Fourteen Foods (University of Alabama Press, 2019).

Since 2022, Foster has been an instructor, writing specialist, and academic advisor at Huntingdon College. For the nineteen years prior, he taught Creative Writing at Booker T. Washington Magnet High School and, during his time there, was awarded grants, fellowships, or residencies from the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Gannett Foundation, the Surdna Foundation, the Lillian E. Smith Foundation, the Center for Arts Education at the Boston Arts Academy, the Alabama State Council on the Arts, and the Alabama Bicentennial Commission. Foster was named the state’s Teacher of the Year by the Alabama PTA in 2010 and was a participant in Arizona State University’s National Sustainability Teachers’ Academy in 2019.

You can keep up with Foster on Facebook, Amazon’s Author Central, and Instagram. (Foster deactivated his Twitter account in December 2022 and his LinkedIn account in September 2023.)  You can also learn more about Foster and his work here by clicking on the links below:

CV/ resumé  •  Press Kit  •  Services (Freelance)

Image Gallery  •  Videos  •  Awards & Honors

Education & the Arts  •  Poetry  •  Photography

On Generation X  •  On Life & Education  •  Gardens

Outside of writing and teaching, Foster is usually either messing around on his guitars, watching an old movie, walking with his dog Chip, watching his kids play their respective sports, or finding a reason to be outside. His other interests are his Catholic faith, cooking and eating, craft beers, gardening and urban farming, all kinds of music, book arts, classic and independent films, family history, social theory, and politics. Foster likes Levi’s jeans and Liberty overalls, a bacon cheeseburger with sweet potato fries, a cold Grapico on a hot day, Miller High Life and New Belgium Fat Tire, black coffee with a little honey in it, Argentine malbecs, spider lilies, paper whites, Mexican petunias, long live tracks by the Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers Band, and a plate of homestyle food with one vegetable of each color. His turnoffs are bottled water, ice-breaker activities, pop country, bell peppers, black olives, sipping lids on coffee cups, traffic, waste, and most of all, rudeness.

*This Foster Dickson is not the Foster Dickson who works in youth ministry. 

All works produced by Foster Dickson (text, imagery, hybrid) on this website are protected within the “Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0” Creative Commons License. For more info about the license, click here: CC BY-NC-ND.

Foster is available to work on longer (book-length) projects and for shorter assignments and speaking engagements or presentations.

For more information, you can contact him using the form below: