Foster Dickson is a writer, editor, and teacher in Montgomery, Alabama. He is the author of Closed Ranks and I Just Make People Up, and the editor of Nobody’s Home: Modern Southern Folklore.

Music

Foster began playing guitar as a teenager in the late 1980s and continues playing to this day. Over the years, he mostly sat in with bands or played informally with friends. His one accomplishment as a guitarist has been playing lead guitar on the song “500 Miles” on Sarah Elizabeth Whitehead’s Where the Redbuds Bloom album. You can also hear him playing the background music on the “Travels” videos for Patchwork in 2009 and 2010.

Theater

Foster was involved in the theater, mostly as a techie, in high school and college. His first theatrical production, as an eighth grader, had him opening and closing the grand drape for Once Upon a Mattress at his school. Working on local college and community theater productions led him to the Technical Theater component at the Carver Creative and Performing Arts Center in high school. He graduated in 1992 with Thespian honors and went to college as a theater major.

From 1987 to 1993, Foster worked or performed in shows at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, the now-defunct Montgomery Little Theater, Huntingdon College’s now-gone Dungeon Theater, Theatre AUM, and Montgomery’s historic Davis Theater. He was also an extra in the 1989 Civil Rights-themed movie Long Walk Home, which was filmed in Montgomery.

In 2024, after more than thirty years away from the theater, Foster participated two informal readings of plays for Nora’s Salon South. The organization putting on the readings, Nora’s Playhouse, was formed in 2015 to support women playwrights in telling women’s stories.

Design

For more than twenty years, Foster has done layout and design for a variety of print publications, a skill he picked up during his days as the production manager at NewSouth Books. In the early 2000s, while working at NewSouth, he assisted students from Auburn University Montgomery with their Filibuster and students from Huntingdon College with The Prelude, and also designed the magazines and broadsides for his own publishing project called honeydü: the sweetest thing. Among a variety of other projects, he did the design, layout, and production for Susan Shenane’s Alabama Listening in the Cold War Era (Coosa River Books, 2007) and for his commissioned work Faith. Virtue. Wisdom. (2023).

From 2003 through 2022, Foster oversaw production and taught book design to the student editors of Graphophobia at Booker T. Washington Magnet High School. That literary magazine won state and national awards over the years. Today, as part of his faculty advisor role, he does the same for Huntingdon College students with The Prelude.

Photography

Foster is a very amateur photographer who lays no claim to any degree of skill, but he does like to capture moments or minutiae that catch his attention. To see some of his photography, click here.