Sesshu Foster

He grew up on Los Angeles’ East Side and came of age in the primarily Chicano neighborhood of City Terrace, where he was influenced by local community organizing and political artmaking.

Foster credits moving to City Terrace the same year as the Watts Riots (1965) with helping to shape his writing voice and concern with social and racial justice and the impacts of gentrification.

Forthcoming in 2020 is a second work of speculative fiction, ELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines.

In “review of ‘made in l.a.’ at the ucla hammer museum,” Foster critiques the omission of artists of color in an exhibit lauded by critics.

[8] The poem is at once a litany of absence as memory as much as it speaks to a firm disagreement with a present (and president) who echo the same histories he experienced 20 years before.