Patricia Foster grew up in coastal Alabama, a region of haunting beauty, a place where mossy ferns spill into back yards and tangled vines snake up trees, where people wave and shout and hug you hello, where rivers and creeks interrupt the flat, noisy land. As a girl, she remembers walking down a narrow stretch of road in Magnolia Springs, Alabama, huge oaks sheltering the street, their heavy branches like arms embracing her while thin streams of light shivered through the leaves. Here, near the banks of that slow-moving river, she felt whole. And yet, as she grew older, the racial and gender narratives of the South uprooted her. It was through writing that she found a way to question the status quo, to struggle with her own contradictions, and to search for meaning beneath the appearance of things.
Patricia Foster is the author of four books, All the Lost Girls, Just beneath My Skin, Girl from Soldier Creek, and the forthcoming Written in the Sky: Lessons of a Southern Daughter. She is the editor of Minding the Body: Women Writers on Body and Soul and Sister to Sister: Women Write about the Unbreakable Bond and co-editor of The Healing Circle (Mary Swander) and Understanding the Essay (Jeff Porter). Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, the Women’s Review of Books, Vogue, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel and other places.
A graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop (MFA) and Florida State University (Ph.D.), Foster has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a PEN Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Clarence Cason Award, a Florida Arts Council Award, a Carl Klaus Teaching Award, and a Dean’s Scholar Award. Seventeen of her essays have been listed as Notable Essays in The Best American Essays series. She has had fellowships from the Inaugural Writing Residency at Sun Yat-sen University, the Virginia Center for the Arts, the Hambridge Center for the Arts, and Yaddo, and has been a juror for the Windham Campbell Literary Prize in Nonfiction (Yale University).
Now a Professor Emerita, Foster was a professor in the MFA Program in Nonfiction at the University of Iowa for twenty-five years, a Visiting Professor at Paul Valery University in Montpelier, France, and taught writing workshops in Barcelona, Prague, Florence, Melbourne, Wollongong as well as in many colleges in the US.
She lives in Iowa City, Iowa, with her husband David Wilder in a house that is now 100 years old.
Marlin Barton is from the Black Belt region of Alabama, a swath of dark, rich soil that runs through the central part of the state. When he was in kindergarten, he was diagnosed with dyslexia and his parents were told by a pediatrician he would never learn to read or write very well. Luckily for Marlin his parents discovered a program that corrected his dyslexia through a series of exercises called patterning. While patterning each day, his mother would read to him, and once freed of dyslexia, he did indeed learn to write without leaving out letters and spelling backwards and a love of reading was already distilled within him.
While taking freshman English at the University of Alabama, he first became aware that he possessed more than the ability to write; he learned that he loved to write when the instructor made all her students keep a daily journal. He then tried his hand at writing poetry, and after deciding he was not a poet, began to wonder if he could write a short story and took several undergraduate creative writing classes.
He received a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Wichita State University and afterward taught at several universities and colleges, including Clemson University. During this period he also began publishing short stories in literary journals, and he went on to have work included in the yearly anthologies Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. He published his first collection, The Dry Well, in 2001, and two other collections followed, Dancing by the River and Pasture Art. In 2016 he was the first recipient of the Capote Prize for short fiction. He also published two novels, A Broken Thing and The Cross Garden, and his third, Children of Dust, is now forthcoming from Regal House Publishing. Maybe not too bad a track record for someone who would never learn to read or write very well.
Marlin lives with his wife Rhonda, and two cats, in a house that overlooks the Alabama River outside of Montgomery, and, since 1997, he’s taught creative writing in a program for juvenile offenders called Writing Our Stories, created by the Alabama Writers’ Forum. He also teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina.
