JADE FOSTER
“I am a poet first and a poet last,” Jade Foster said in an online interview with GLAAD. But in between those poles, Foster is also a literary entrepreneur: she founded and then produced the traveling poetry salon The Revival for five years. The grassroots series brought new and established queer women of color poets to people´s living rooms, basement apartments and other intimate spaces from Toronto to Atlanta. Speakers like t´ai freedom ford, Natasha T. Miller and Nikky Finney performed searingly honest works that explored the experiences of queer women of color, a community that Foster says is often ignored by the mainstream. “It´s important for me to create spaces where black women are loving up on each other,” Foster says. The tour´s DIY ethos was both a challenge and a thrill. “The 9-5 life was not for us, and if we plan and promote and have the right intention, it never has to be.” Foster has appeared in the web series The Peculiar Kind and Terence Nance´s short film How to Recall What I Already Knew in addition to the upcoming documentary The Revival Movie: Woman and the Word (directed by another Woman We Love this year, Sekiya Dorsett). Foster is looking forward to breaking ground with her next project, Chloe, in 2016. -KL
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