Patricia Foster, a professor of English at the University of Iowa, has been chosen as the winner of the 2017 Clarence Cason Award in Nonfiction Writing. The award, administered by College of Communication and Information Sciences and the department of journalism and creative media at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, honors a writer with a strong connection to Alabama whose work has made a critical contribution to the journalism or literature of the South. Professor Foster is a native of Alabama.
Professor Foster is being honored for her body of work which includes the memoir All the Lost Girls: Confessions of a Southern Daughter (University of Alabama Press, 2000) and her autobiography Just Beneath My Skin: Autobiography and Self-Discovery (University of Georgia Press, 2004).
Professor Foster joined the faculty at the University of Iowa in 1994. She is a graduate of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where she majored in sociology. She holds master of fine arts degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles and the Iowa Writers Workshop. Professor Foster earned a Ph.D. in English at Florida State University.