Praise for Written in the Sky

A book of deeply personal essays that interrogate the legacy of racial tensions in the South, the constriction of caste and gender, and the ways race, class, and white privilege are entwined in her family story.

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

An immersive story that asks the hardest questions and answers them with powerful and propulsive historical fiction.

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

Praise for Just beneath My Skin

These eleven closely linked personal essays are at once an absorbing chronicle of a life fully undertaken and a model for anyone who has contemplated self-investigation through autobiographical writing.

Patricia Foster knows that the best stories are those we carry around inside us

Her art is to hold moments of everyday experience–as daughter, woman, lover, wife; as child at home and as adult returning to childhood territory–up to the light and see what insights can be gleaned from them.

Adam Hochschild, Author of King Leopold's Ghost

Intelligent, self-deprecating, warm, and lively

“Just beneath My Skin” is engaging and thought-provoking.

Pam Kingsbury, Southern Scribe

Intelligent, self-deprecating, warm, and lively

With serious considerations of autobiography’s aims and methods.

Foster’s collection is bound together by beautiful prose and unflinching honesty. Clearly, she herself adheres to the advice that she dispenses to her students: ‘Writing requires risk.’ And it is this sort of truthful scrutiny that extends her collection beyond its apparent subject matter: ‘the life of a southern girl who ran away from the South but who, deep in her bones, feels the pull of that history, that story.’

Publishers Weekly

Perceptive, thoughtful—and thought-provoking—with abundant moments of insight

A valuable and honest look at one woman’s confrontation with herself in the context of culture, place, and history.

It is likewise a treatise, one powerfully demonstrated within the pages of all five memoirs–on the ways that writing about one’s own life can lead to recovery of the past through memory and imagination, as well as to an enlightened understanding of one’s present and the ways it was shaped by that past.

Kirkus Reviews

Told with the grace and ease of a “yesterday” discovery

Foster seems to have found a place of redemption, where she is at home living beyond the ordinary, which, in turn, infuses her writing with its notable lyricism.

Janet St. John, Booklist

This is a beautifully written collection of essays that explores central issues of female identity

With unflinching honesty, Foster takes on the large and emotionally charged topics of class, race, and gender. She makes a strong case for the autobiography–why it is more important than ever in our contemporary world.

Mary Swander, Author of The Desert Pilgrim

Praise for Minding the Body

An important and much-needed book for women who seek to understand their bodies and find independent, imaginative ways to cope with aging, beauty expectations, beauty expectations, and ethnic comparisons.

An appealing mix of fashionable critics, authors, and journalists write with varying degrees of humor, regret, and honesty about how they really feel about how they look.

Glamour

These writers have literally put private thoughts on the line, doing in print what good women friends do all the time: comparing notes in hopes that they’ll tap knowledge, comfort and a new strength.

Detroit Free Press

A terrific read filled with the personal stories of 20 gifted writers

The contributors are a perfect mix: writers of different ages, races and degrees of conformity to American standards of beauty.

The tone is consistently raw, intensely personal; you really feel as if you are inside these writers’ heads… So for those who proclaim that in the 1990s American women have finally achieved tremendous power and gains, Minding the Body is a needed slap-in-the-face reminder that women still live in a separate sphere — the objectified body.

Women’s Review of Books

Praise for Sister to Sister

Women write about the unbreakable bond

A powerful collection

Forget the sugar-coated, over-sentimental portrayal of sibling bonding. Through essays and short stories written by nineteen female authors, Patricia Foster has put together an honest account of the ups and downs of sisterhood.

Indianapolis Star

Whether you have a sister or not, whether you are close to her or not, Sister to Sister reaffirms the essential bond between women.

Tallahassee Democrat

Brilliant… This is definitely the book I’d give to a friend or sister

Elizabeth Crow, New York Times Book Review

Sensitive, thoughtful, provocative and beautifully written

Underneath all these highly individualized tales there is a seamless web of shared sisterhood.

Daily Press (Newport News, Virginia)

Praise for Girl from Soldier Creek

Two sisters must learn how to disentangle themselves from their home, their dysfunctional family, and ultimately, from each other to discover who they will become after leaving Soldier Creek.

An essential and quintessential American story

Jit is brought to life in prose as fluid as the element she swims in.

Janet Burroway, Author of Losing Tim and Bridge of Sand

Plants Foster firmly in the pantheon of Southern literature

Foster has created two memorable sisters who cannot seem to escape the chokehold of the land on which they were born and the family in whose midst they grew.

Robin Hemley, Author of Reply All and Do-Over

What a thrilling read!

Sensual, keenly observed, and astonishingly beautiful, it pulled me into its world.

At a thousand points, I thought, Oh, this is me, this explains me, no, this explains life itself, for Girl from Soldier Creek is, in the ways of the most significant, memorable novels, a handbook of consciousness, or self-realization and freedom. The characters, especially the sensitive, audacious Jit Soldier, will continue to live in me.

Bonita Friedman, author of Surrendering Oz and Writing Past Dark

Praise for All the Lost Girls: Confessions of a Southern Daughter

This powerful memoir turns a critical yet loving eye on the sometimes volatile culture of the South and the relationships between mothers and daughters.

The ghost of Faulkner himself haunts this graceful but dark-edged memoir of life in the South

A nuanced and thoughtful memoir narrated by a practiced and unsentimental storyteller.

Kirkus Reviews

Foster writes with warmth and love about her life and the way it intertwined with her mother’s, revealing much about attaining her own sense of self and about Alabama during the sixties and seventies.

Library Journal

No one who has had a Southern girlhood will fail to relive it here, in this warm, serious, unpretentious, generous book.

Kelly Cherry, Hollins Critic

Praise for The Healing Circle

A collection of insightful essays by some of the most exceptional voices in literature, The Healing Circle explores profound questions about the experience of recovery from physical and emotional illness.

Should be required reading for budding young doctors

This collection of essays gives voice to the effect of disease on the soul and on the psyche. through its powerful and revealing prose, we come to realize that even in the absence of a cure, a ‘healing’ — a coming to terms of the patient with his or her illness — can take place.

Abraham Verghese, M.D., Author of My Own Country: A Doctor's Story

Stands as a comfort to anyone who has struggled with chronic illness and an inspiration to those who have not

This remarkable book affirms that recovery does not mean reclaiming what one has lost, but finding the patience and the courage to accept the new and the unknown.

Hope Edelman, author of Motherless Daughters

Praise for Understanding the Essay

This is a book on how to read the essay, one that demonstrates how reading is inextricably tied to the art of writing. It aims to treat the essay with the close attention that has been given to other literary genres, and in doing so it suggests the beauty and depth of the form as a whole. At once personal appreciations and acute critical assessments, the pieces collected here broaden our perspective on the essay as a major literary art, tracing its history from William Hazlitt to Joan Didion.

A warm and intelligent addition to our understanding of a form seemingly built for confusion

Foster and Porter know their subject: the subtle demands and inventions of the form; the tension between a narrator and her unsettled sibling, the author; the importance of integrity to both the known and the inventive voice. The brief biographies create a nuanced context in which to read the work; the analytic essays offer insight into work we think we know — or have yet to explore — in such a way that we can read as though for the first time.

Sally Tisdale

Teachers, students, and essayists will be bending back pages and marking the margins for years to come

Understanding the Essay is a magnificently intelligent examination of the essay’s diverse pleasures, with fresh, revealing looks at writers from Montaigne to David Foster Wallace. Bravo to Patricia Foster and Jeff Porter for providing this important, insightful, readable resource.

Dinty W. Moore, Author of Crafting the Personal Essay