Foster Dickson is a writer, editor and teacher in Montgomery, Alabama. He is the author of three books: Kindling Not Yet Split (Court Street Press, 2002), I Just Make People Up: Ramblings with Clark Walker (NewSouth Books, 2009), and The Life and Poetry of John Beecher (Edwin Mellen Press, 2009), and the general editor of Treasuring Alabama's Black Belt (AUM/AHF, 2009).

The 2010 Alabama Book Festival featured a panel discussion on the work of John Beecher and Barbara Beecher. The panel include Foster Dickson and NewSouth Books editor-in-chief Randall Williams, who discussed knowing John Beecher and the publication of One More River to Cross. The Alabama Book Festival was held annually on the third Saturday on April 17, 2010. (Click the image below for the festival's website.)

Foster's book, The Life and Poetry of John Beecher, 1904-1980: Advocate of Poetry as a Spoken Art is now available for sale. The release date was August 15, 2009, and its standard retail price is $99.95 in hardcover.

John Beecher was a poet, writer, journalist, editor, sociologist and activist who lived from 1904-1980. He was a descendant of Lyman Ward Beecher, Henry Ward Beecher, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. During his life, John Beecher worked in Birmingham's steel mills and wrote poetry about his experiences, taught literature at the University of Wisconsin's Experimental College in the early 1930s, attended the University of North Carolina to study with Howard Odum and worked as a New Deal programs administrator during the Depression, worked for the Fair Employment Practices Commission at the onset of World War II, volunteered for the Navy's first interracial crew during the war, was blacklisted during the 1950s for refusing to sign a loyalty oath, covered the Civil Rights movement as a journalist, and protested the Vietnam War, and wrote poetry throughout a fifty-year career. He was a widely recognized poet in the 1960s and 1970s, but his work faded away and virtually disappeared after his death in 1980. Unfortunately, no biography or critical study about him was ever published.On a brighter note, in 2003, NewSouth Books published a volume of selected poems, One More River to Cross, returning Beecher's poetry to circulation after more than two decades of being out of print.

One of John Beecher's poetry books,
1968's Hear The Wind Blow: Poems of Protest and Prophecy

Foster Dickson has devoted significant effort to re-establishing John Beecher's legacy. In 2005, he traveled to North Carolina to interview Beecher's widow Barbara and to begin working with her on ensuring that her late husband's life and work were preserved properly. Foster wrote a master's thesis, "With My Mind Set On Freedom": The Life and Works of John Beecher, which contains Beecher's biographical facts and a defense of his poetry. An enhanced version of that work has been published by scholarly publisher, Edwin Mellen Press and was released under the title The Life and Poetry of John Beecher, 1904-1980: Advocate of Poetry as a Spoken Art; the book's preface was written by Fred Whitehead. Foster also wrote the entry on John Beecher for Auburn University's Encyclopedia of Alabama, and has heavily contributed to the Wikipedia entry on him. Foster is currently compiling Beecher's journalism for an edited collection that will serve as a retrospective of how Beecher used writing to defend the rights of working and poor people.

For more on John Beecher, you can visit one of the few literary sources that includes him: editor Cary Nelson's Modern American Poetry website hosted by the University of Illinois.