Patricia Foster will read from her new collection of essays, Written in the Sky: Lessons of a Southern Daughter. She will be joined in conversation by author Darius Stewart. In 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, the constriction of caste and gender, and the ways race, class, and white privilege are entwined in her family story. After interviewing girls at Booker T. Washington High School in Tuskegee, Alabama, visiting the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, and exploring Africatown in Plateau, Alabama, Patricia Foster was moved to reflect on the racial scars and crossroads in her southern past as well as to reckon with the intimate places of her own wounding and grief.

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.

Darius Stewart is the author of the poetry collection Intimacies in Borrowed Light and the forthcoming memoir, Be Not Afraid of My Body. A graduate of the Iowa Nonfiction Writing program, he currently teaches at the University of Iowa.

All are welcome to attend this Krause Series in Contemporary Nonfiction event.

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