Foster Dickson is a writer, editor, and teacher in Montgomery, Alabama. His poems have appeared in Boudin, Steel Toe Review, and Birmingham Poetry Review, as well as other online and print journals.

Poetry has occupied different places in Foster’s life over time. He began writing poems as a teenager in the late 1980s and was an English major in the ’90s with the intention of having a career as a poet. After the 2002 publication of his chapbook Kindling Not Yet Split, about twenty of his poems were published in small-circulation and online literary journals between 2003 and 2006. However, during this time, his writing life shifted with the demands of teaching and of writing nonfiction. Yet, he never stopped writing, reading, sharing, or studying poetry (especially haiku).

Foster rarely submitted poems to journals between 2006 and 2024 but was writing them often. Two poems were published in literary magazines during those eighteen years, one in Birmingham Arts Journal in 2009 and another in Steel Toe Review in 2013. Foster has participated in a few public readings, has reviewed new volumes of poetry periodically, and while he was teaching at BTW Magnet, helped to organize an annual program for National Poetry Month. He has also maintained a habit of sharing haiku on Instagram. In 2024, ending that lengthy hiatus from submitting to journals, Foster sent a few batches went out to editors for consideration.

Recent

Foster’s poem “They Come, Growling” was published yesterday in the October 2024 issue of Boudin, a literary magazine housed at McNeese State University in Louisiana. The issue is a “Creature Feature” whose theme is monsters and related subjects. This is Foster’s first poem to be published in eleven years.

On Tuesday, May 10, 2022, Foster was a presenting writer in the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts’ Mindfulness Inspires program. The event featured five central Alabama writers. Foster’s found poem, composed in the pantoum form and made up of fragments from the short story at the center of the event, was titled “The Impertinence of It and the Everlastingness.” The following is the description from the museum’s website:

On December 14, 2021, Foster was a presenting writer at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts’ Wilderness Inspires program. The event, which was free and open to the public, featured local writers sharing literary works based on the Lesley Dill, Wilderness: Light Sizzles Around Me exhibit. Foster’s ekphrastic poem was titled “A Broken Haibun within the Place Where Wild Deer Go.”

The links below lead to selections from Foster’s writing about poetry and poets:

Review of Glass Cabin by Tina Mozelle Braziel and James Braziel for the Alabama Writers Forum, July 2024

Review of Versions of May by Jim Murphy for the Alabama Writers Forum, September 2023

Review of Outside from the Inside by Anne Whitehouse for the Alabama Writers Forum, July 2023

Essay: Am I Supposed to Laugh or Not? (On the Poetry of Rodney Jones), from April 2023

Review of American Happiness by Jacqueline Trimble for the Alabama Writers Forum, January 2017

A Gardener-Poet’s Mid-Spring, from May 2012

Reading A Poet’s Anti-Rule Book by Steve Kowit, from May 2011

Reading Adrienne Rich’s “Poetry and Commitment,” from June 2010

Essay: “Bringing Poetry Back Home,” originally published in Multicultural Review, Winter 2009

The Life and Poetry of John Beecher, 1904 – 1980, published by Edwin Mellen Press, 2009

“An Interview with Ron Whitehead” in Evergreen Review #110, 2005