Foster Dickson is a writer, editor, and teacher in Montgomery, Alabama. He is the author of Closed Ranks and I Just Make People Up, the editor of Nobody’s Home, and the coordinator of The Fitzgerald Museum’s annual Literary Contest.

New:

The Open Submissions Period for Nobody’s Home: Modern Southern Folklore opened on April 15, 2024. Each year, an Open Submissions Period runs between April 15 and June 15. All submitting writers then receive their replies in July, and accepted submissions are published in August. As always, queries for reviews and interviews will be considered year-round.

In the editor’s blog Groundwork, recent posts have featured essays ruminating on school-choice vouchers, current anti-CRT/anti-DEI efforts, and the connections between Southern culture and horror films. From the Editor’s Reading List come discussions of Albert Murray’s South to a Very Old Place from 1970, Zachary J. Lechner’s The South of the Mind from 2018, and Alexander P. Lamis’s Southern Politics in the 1990s.

The winners of the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum‘s sixth annual Literary Contest were announced on March 15, 2024. This year’s theme was “The Best Postman in the World,” which implied works about ambition and goals or excellence in one’s work. The judges for 2023 – 2024 were fiction writer and professor Jim Hilgartner, 2018 Alabama Teacher of the Year Zestlan Simmons, and Alabama Living editor Lenore Vickrey.

For information on the 2023 – 2024 winners, click the link in the word “winners” above. For information about past year’s contests, click the year below:
2019  •  2020  •  2021  •  2022  •  2023

Two of Foster’s books are now available at Montgomery’s Southern Art & Makers Collective. The store is located on Madison Avenue across from Patterson Field. Closed Ranks and I Just Make People Up, both of which are on local subjects, are on the shelves among works by dozens of other local artists, craftspeople, and writers. The collective’s store is open Wednesday through Saturday from 12:00 noon until 5:00 PM.

Dirty Boots: Irregular Attempts at Critical Thinking and Border Crossing offers a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on the culture, politics, and general milieu of the 21st century. In the most recent column, Foster considers a recent visit to Tuskegee. Other recent columns have discussed the idea of collective memory, the late Shorty Price, Foster’s thoughts on turning 50, the legacy of conservative writer Kevin Phillips, and the Milligan ruling that led to Alabama’s new congressional district map.

Written and published intermittently since April 2014, these short columns have covered such wide-ranging topics as Alabama’s last-place national rankings, naysayers who hate on arts education, the poetry of Rumi, spelling and our Southern dialect, and our common values.

In April, Foster published number 68 in the Southern Movies series about the 1983 made-for-TV movie Murder in Coweta County, starring Johnny Cash and Andy Griffith. He has been writing these blog posts, which contain both plot summary and analysis, since 2013. The series has discussed and dissected dozens of movies that are about the South, set in the South, and/or involve Southern characters. In addition to the posts about individual movies, there are also samplers that discuss subject-focused groupings and “quick tributes” to lesser-known actors who were featured in Southern movies.

Recent:

Foster read the role of Skip in a recent Nora’s Salon South event for the play They Must Be Women Now! by Nedra Pezold Roberts. The informal reading, which was directed by Jacqueline Allen Trimble, was held at the NewSouth Bookstore in Montgomery on February 12. The organization putting on the event, Nora’s Playhouse, was formed in 2015 to support women playwrights in telling women’s stories.

Foster was the presenting writer at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts’ In the Arts career night for teens on October 26, 2023. The event, which is held annually by the museum’s education department, offers local middle and high school students the opportunity to talk with professionals who work in visual art, writing, design, music, and other fields about what a career in those fields would entail.

Foster’s commemorative/historical book Faith. Virtue. Wisdom. was released at a public reception and ribbon-cutting ceremony on October 10, 2023. The book details the history and evolution of Montgomery Catholic Preparatory School and celebrates its 150th anniversary.

Montgomery Catholic was founded as St. Mary of Loretto School in 1873 by the Sisters of Loretto. Over a century-and-a-half, St. Mary of Loretto evolved into a regional K-12 school with three campuses, to become the longest-standing continuously operated school in Montgomery and one of the most enduring in the state of Alabama. Foster’s book-length treatment of this history was a commissioned work, and copies are available through the school.

Foster was the featured guest on a recent episode of The Fitzgerald Museum’s podcast “The FitzMuse.” He and museum director Alaina Doten discuss Zelda’s 1918 short story “The Iceberg,” which won the young writer a creative writing prize in high school. The episode ends with information about the museum’s own prizes for young writers.

Foster wrote three book reviews for the Alabama Writers Forum in 2023. His review of Jim Murphy’s new poetry collection Versions of May was published in September 2023. Murphy has published several poetry collections and teaches at Montevallo University. This collection was published by Negative Capability Press. Prior to that one, he wrote a review of poet Anne Whitehouse’s poetry collection Outside from the Inside in the summer. And his review of historian Jefferson Cowie’s now-Pulitzer Prize winner Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power was published in April.

In May 2023, Foster shared “Southern Roots in Four Plays by August Wilson,” which examines the work of one of his favorite playwrights. The essay looks The Piano Lesson, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, and Fences, focusing on how the backstories and underpinnings within the plays’ conflicts have roots in aspects of Southern culture.

For 2023’s National Poetry Month, Foster shared his essay “Am I Supposed to Laugh or Not?” which examines the work of one of his favorite poets, Rodney Jones. The essay looks at poems from four of his collections, focusing on the role of dark humor and its effect on the reader. Jones is a native of Hartselle, Alabama, and his collection Elegy for the Southern Drawl was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

On Friday evening, February 17, 2023 Foster moderated a discussion on social-justice issues to wrap up a pilgrimage to the Alabama Black Belt by the Loretto Community, an order of Catholic women religious based in Kentucky. The discussion, which also included local Montgomerians, was arranged by Mary Boone, the widow of Rev. Richard Boone. The gathering was held at the Montgomery Interpretive Center on the campus of Alabama State University. Earlier in the week, a dozen Sisters of Loretto and lay co-members spent time in Alabama visiting Montgomery Catholic Preparatory School, which was founded by their order in 1873, and learning more about the history of injustice in the South. The Friday evening discussion was meant to explore ways that the Loretto Community can get more involved in efforts toward progress.

*The photograph that appears in the header of the website was taken on US Highway 80 between Newbern and Selma.

Passing the Hat