bio

I was born in Altoona, formerly one of the country’s great railroad towns, located in the Allegheny Mountains in western Pennsylvania and grew up in nearby Hollidaysburg, a tiny town surrounded by farmlands and forests, quarries and strip mines. After attending Smith College and Stanford Law School on scholarships, I practiced law in San Francisco for ten years, then worked as an advocate and grassroots political organizer for parents of kids with autism and other learning disorders.

I continue to do volunteer work for causes related to autism and teach and write in northern California, where I live with my husband and three teenagers. In January of 2010 I will receive my MFA from Warren Wilson College. My recent poetry is published or forthcoming in small print journals including Atlanta Review, Margie, North American Review, The Hudson Review, and Women’s Review of Books, earning awards including two Pushcart nominations in 2008. Dark Card and Mom’s Canoe won the 2007 and 2008 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prizes, and my full length book, All That Gorgeous, Pitiless Song won the 2008 Many Mountains Moving Poetry Book Award and will be released in 2010.  Also to be released in 2010, by Tebot Bach Press, is God, Seed, a book of environmental poetry with art by Lorna Stevens.

My favorite links for learning more about autism are:

www.taalliance.org/
www.autism-society.org
www.autismspeaks.org/
www.feat.org
www.asperger.org

contact
info@rebeccafoust.com