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This is author M.K. Foster reading “Monstrous Rayne” from A Time Of Monsters, a Contingent Magazine 2025 special issue.
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Dr. M.K. Foster is a poet, fiction writer, and historian of science from Alabama. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Nimrod, The Gettysburg Review, The Spenser Review, Crannóg, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere, and 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. A 2024 MacDowell Fellow in Literature and a 2025 Maison Dora Maar Fellow, Foster recently served as the 2024-25 Fulbright US Scholar in Creative Writing at Queens University Belfast in Northern Ireland. In Fall 2025, her poetry collection The Great Dying was selected for the Codhill Press Editor’s Prize and will be published in 2026. For monsters and more, please visit: marykatherinefoster.com.