MK Foster Book Launch: The Great Dying
Join us as we celebrate the launch of MK Foster's The Great Dying: Poems as Seen on TV. We could not be more thrilled for this release and the person behind it!
- Sunday, November 15
- 2:00pm
- Little Professor
- RSVP is requested
- Additional books will be available for purchase at the event
About the Book
A hyperreal continuum of poems that reflect inner and outer landscapes transfixed by sacrilege, absurdity, divinity, humor, awe, pop culture, and the sublime, and unhinged by grief and anxiety in seasons of extinction, mass death, and apocalyptic revelation.
Born from a lost season, The Great Dying: Poems As Seen on TV reads as an enthralling pre-Raphaelite action movie from an apocalyptic world of mass death and personal reckoning, one where the wild, god-eat-god plains of Internet media become a spaghetti western wilderness of holy metamorphosis as fast food, hideous horses, and viral pop culture lore become diving rods for a female body navigating extreme weathers of grief, horror, fury, beauty, panic, and mania. Haunted by cartoons, Tom Cruise, balloon animals, and broken fire alarms and led by the Virgilian spectre of Emily Dickinson, The Great Dying beholds wonder in a merciless season to hold space for mercy in a light-forsaken world, ever lit from within by the knowledge that such surrender to the sublime is not only a radical act of survival: it is a hagioscope through which we glimpse transfiguration until we become it.
About the Author
MK Foster is a poet, fiction writer, and historian of science from Alabama. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Nimrod, Indiana Review, Poet Lore, The Gettysburg Review, Molotov Cocktail, Best New Poets, and elsewhere in the United States, and in Skylight 47, Crannóg, and The Apiary in the United Kingdom and Ireland, where she was nominated for a 2026 Forward Prize. She has presented her archival research on Renaissance monstrosity, sharks, and apocalypses at the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Newberry Library, the National Museum of Denmark, and elsewhere. In 2024, she was named a MacDowell Fellow in Literature and selected for the 2025 Fulbright US Scholar Award in Creative Writing at Queens University Belfast in Northern Ireland. In Fall 2025, she returned abroad as a Maison Dora Maar Fellow in Ménerbes, France. Foster's current projects include a poetry collection about deep geologic time and the divine feminine, a manuscript of fairytales, a southern gothic monster saga, and an apocryphal novel retelling of the Flood epic. She holds an MFA and a PhD but holds especially dear her work as a bookseller and storyteller at Little Professor Bookshop in Birmingham, Alabama.