Linda Nemec Foster
Linda Nemec Foster was born near Cleveland in 1950 to John and Helen Nemec. All four of her grandparents were immigrants from southern Poland—a fact that has been important thematically in a number of Foster’s poems. She graduated from Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1972 with a BA in social science. After receiving her undergraduate degree, Foster worked at the Center for Environmental Study in Grand Rapids as a social demographer. In 1974, she moved to Detroit and began writing poetry. She gained critical support for her work from the poet and visual artist Faye Kicknosway, who encouraged Nemec Foster to develop her craft at the graduate level. Following that advice, in 1977, she enrolled in the MFA creative writing program at Goddard College in Vermont. While there, she studied under Stephen Dobyns, Louise Glück, Donald Hall, Robert Hass, Lisel Mueller, and Ellen Bryant Voigt, among other notable writers. She graduated in 1979 with her MFA in creative writing with an emphasis in poetry.
Nemec Foster is the author of more than a dozen collections of poetry, including The Lake Huron Mermaid: A Tale in Poems (Wayne State University Press, 2024); Bone Country: Prose Poems (Cornerstone Press, 2023); The Blue Divide (New Issues Press, 2021); The Lake Michigan Mermaid (Wayne State University Press, 2018), a collaboration with co-author Anne-Marie Oomen and artist Meridith Ridl, which was honored as a 2019 Michigan Notable Book; Listen to the Landscape (Eerdmans Publishing, 2006), which was short-listed for the Michigan Notable Book Award; and Amber Necklace from Gdansk (Louisiana State University Press, 2001), a finalist for the Ohioana Book Award in Poetry.
Nemec Foster’s work has been published in major anthologies in the United States and the United Kingdom. Her poetry has also been exhibited in museums and galleries, translated into European languages, and produced for the stage. She has collaborated with musicians Steve Talaga and Laszlo Slomovits on songs inspired by poetry from her chapbooks.
Nemec Foster has won numerous honors for her poetry, including the Creative Arts Prize from the Polish American Historical Association and more than thirty nominations for the Pushcart Prize. She has received two grants from the Michigan Council for the Arts, fellowships from the Arts Foundation of Michigan and ArtServe Michigan, and a teaching fellowship from the National Writer’s Voice Project.
In 1997, Nemec Foster cofounded (with her husband, Anthony) the Contemporary Writers Series at Aquinas College, which has featured such poets as Traci Brimhall, Camille T. Dungy, Joy Harjo, Seamus Heaney, Maxine Kumin, Li-Young Lee, Clarence Major, Naomi Shihab Nye, Gregory Orr, and Linda Pastan. From 1980 to 2002, she taught poetry workshops throughout the state of Michigan for the Creative Writers in the Schools Program, which was coordinated by the Michigan Council for the Arts and Cultural Affairs. She has also taught poetry and writing classes at the college level at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan, and Aquinas College. Additionally, she has been a guest lecturer in poetry at numerous colleges and universities.
From 2003 to 2005, Nemec Foster served as the inaugural poet laureate of Grand Rapids.