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Patricia Foster

Patricia Foster is professor emerita at the University of Iowa’s MFA Program in Nonfiction, where she taught for twenty-five years. She is author of numerous books, including Girl from Soldier Creek, Just beneath My Skin, and All the Lost Girls: Confessions of a Southern Daughter.

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Latest Book Release

Written in the Sky

Patricia Foster presents a double portrait of place and family, a book of deeply personal essays that interrogate the legacy of racial tensions in the South. What matters to her are the shadow stories beneath our mythologies, the complicated and radiant narratives that must be excavated and reckoned with.

Written in the Sky and my other works can be found at major booksellers

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What Other Writers Are Saying About Written in the Sky

A probing, insightful, and often lyrical book

Taking a cue from James Baldwin, who found the innocence of the privileged white American appalling, Patricia Foster has recounted her own trajectory from clueless small-town Southern girl to a hard-won loss of innocence about the reality of racism, in this stunningly written, unique and vital memoir.

Phillip Lopate
Author of The Golden Age of the American Essay: 1945 – 1970

Foster’s leap of moral imagination is where we all must go to find hope

Frye Gaillard, Author of A Hard Rain: America in the 1960s, Our Decade of Hope, Possibility, and Innocence Lost

Foster’s mastery of the essay is in full bloom

Jerald Walker, Author of How to Make a Slave and Other Essays

A probing, insightful, and often lyrical book

Adam Hochschild, Author of American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis

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More about Patricia Foster

About Me

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My Latest Book

Some of My Essays

Fog

The Club from Nowhere

The Red Chair

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