GLOW HORSE LEARNING

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Dr. M.K. Foster is a poet, gothic fiction writer, historian of science, monster scholar, Renaissance ecocritic, and public storyteller from Birmingham, Alabama. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The American Poetry Review; Nimrod; Witness; The Gettysburg Review; The Massachusetts Review; Narrative; Sixth Finch; The Columbia Review; Kenyon Review; Indiana Review; Crazyhorse; Poet Lore; Fourteen Hills; The Missouri Review; Crab Orchard; Rattle; and elsewhere. Her poetry has also been recognized with the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize (selected by Stanley Plumly), an Academy of American Poets Prize (selected by Sally Keith), two Pushcart Prize nominations (2015), and Best of the Net nominations in 2016 and 2019, as well as inclusion in both Best New Poets 2017 (selected by Natalie Diaz), Best New Poets 2019 (selected by Cate Marvin), and Best New Poets 2024 (selected by Anders Carlson-Wee). Foster's gothic fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Crow & Cross Keys, Molotov Cocktail, Bonemilk II, and Two Peach. In Fall 2020, Foster's fiction was a 'Top 10' selection for Molotov Cocktail's 'Flash Monster' prize issue.

Grounded in early modern ecocriticism, literary analysis, visual culture, and the history of science, Foster's interdisciplinary archival research focuses on spectacular monstrosity and horror in the natural world, a vein of interests that has led to such diverse subjects as 'monftrous rayne', fossilized shark teeth, apocalypses, roadkill, mappa mundi, and Wunderkammer. Her recent works include her current book project Flood to Fire: Early Modern Europe and the Natural History of Mass Extinction, her analysis of gyaunts in The Spenser Review, an in-progress essay quartet on the history of sharks and the episteme of apex predators in the early modern imagination, and her developing public digital humanities project Natural Histories, Natural Futures. In addition to her creative and academic work, Foster is an award-winning educator and curriculum inventor and is the Founder and Executive Director of Glow Horse Learning, an education company that designs and adapts critical thinking and writing curricula for primary and secondary educators teaching writing-based classes.

A 2024 MacDowell Fellow in Literature and a 2025 Maison Dora Maar Fellow, Foster is the grateful recipient of several residencies, fellowships, and grants for her creative and academic work, including a Renaissance Society of America Travel Grant, an Artist Grant to the Vermont Studio Center, a National Alumni Association Fellowship, and two Grants-In-Aid to the Folger Shakespeare Library. She holds a BA from Birmingham-Southern College, an MFA from the University of Maryland, and a PhD from the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies at the University of Alabama. In 2024, she was selected for the 2024-25 Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award in Creative Writing to the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queens University Belfast, UK, where she will be abroad in 2025 working on an apocryphal verse novel retelling of the Flood epic as set within the 21st-century mass extinction crisis of climate change.