![]() ![]() What are some of the surprising things about your tenure so far? I’ve created a Marin County Poet Laureate Facebook page in English and one in Spanish, and I am diligent about taking photos and updating that page. Something else I’ve done is organize open mics at our libraries around themes - an open mic on immigration at the Civic Center library, one on peace at the Corte Madera library, and one on gender at the Mill Valley library. I do workshops, spend time in the classroom and organize reading opportunities across the county - at Rebound Bookstore, Fairfax Library, the Marin County Fair. Because of the location, I work primarily with immigrant children from Central and South America, but ForWords serves all underprivileged children. I established a partnership with ForWords Literary Lab, a nonprofit in Montecito Plaza in San Rafael, with a mission to use literature to improve the daily lives of underprivileged children. What do the programs you’ve created look like on the ground? Perhaps the most important service poetry can provide now is as a respite from or a way to respond to current political events, and I very much had in mind bringing attention to our immigrant community here in Marin County. My poet laureate project is “Poetry as Sanctuary,” which ties in with California’s status as a sanctuary state. The only way I could envision taking this position and spending this time was if I got to do some good in the world. I’m so grateful for founder Richard Brown and the Marin County Free Library, as the program is administered by and under their auspices. I am floored by the support I’ve gotten and the leeway I’ve been given. I got to reinvent this position, as each of the four poet laureates before me has been able to do. Tell me about your mission as Marin County poet laureate. Her schedule for spreading this message is robust, full of regular appearances in schools, libraries, community workshops, retirement homes, rotary meetings, festivals, the Marin County Fair - anywhere she can endorse the use of language and narrative as a path to personal empowerment and social justice. “Poetry is a sacred space - church, a hospital, a hospice bed - offering a safe place for our most private, urgent and otherwise ineffable expressions,” she said in her first public laureate remarks. On the contrary, Foust has used her role more socially, to encourage people who, like her, have had few role models for pursuing a literary life she’s also promoting poetry as a mode of expression for all. This is no quietly ruminating bard delivering highfalutin words from the shelter of an idyllic retreat. True to form, Foust breaks the poet mold as well. ![]() Her Marin poet laureate title spans from 2017 to 2019. Foust writes a weekly poetry column for the national magazine Women’s Voices for Change and has served on the Marin Poetry Center Board of Directors since 2008. She emerged as a poet and over the next decade she published five prize-winning collections, earned fellowships from The Frost Place, MacDowell, Sewanee and West Chester University Poetry Conference, and won kudos including the James Hearst Poetry Prize, the American Literary Review Fiction Award, and the Constance Rooke Prize for Creative Nonfiction. After earning scholarships to attend Smith College and Stanford University Law School, she went into private law practice and then, while raising a son who had Asperger’s, became an advocate for children with autism.Īfter quietly writing unpublished poems in her walk-in closet while she raised her young children, Foust enrolled in the MFA degree program at Warren Wilson College at age 50. Growing up in the working class manufacturing town of Altoona, Pennsylvania, she was first in her family to go to college. ![]() REBECCA FOUST, MARIN County’s current poet laureate, has spent a lifetime breaking the mold. ![]()
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