Born in Bloomington, Illinois, Tonya M. Foster is more accurately a native of a home that no longer is what it was (as always), a home made less familiar by time, by water, by natural calamities and socially orchestrated disasters. Home = New Orleans, or rather N'Awlins—that dike- enclosed fabrication caught among the Mississippi River, Lake Pontchartrain, and the Gulf of Mexico, three tongues which should dictate the wills and ways of the city. Now residing in Harlem, she is a co-editor of Third Mind: Creative Writing through Visual Art, and a PhD candidate at the Graduate Center, CUNY, where she studies the poetics of place.