Cecil Foster is often described as a renaissance man because of his many intellectual interests. He is an author, an academic and a public intellectual. But should you ask him to describe himself he would probably explain that he is a writer who uses many genres to tell stories about the human condition and the struggles by individuals for a better world. These stories might be in the form of his acclaimed fiction or told through his journalism and media commentaries. Or they might be in his award-winning academic writing and teaching. Or they might be in general nonfiction. These stories are about hope and about social justice and freedom.
Cecil Foster would also tell you that he is intrigued by living in the Americas, that historically idealistic place of second chances for so many individuals and traditional groups of outcasts, the rejected and marginalized, a region teeming with the hybridity and improvisation of peoples and cultures. Foster was born in Barbados which still provides much material for his writing across genres. He moved to Toronto, Canada, where his writing blossomed and where he eventually became a full-time scholar/academic. He was a professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada. Currently, he is Professor, Director of Graduate Studies, and Associate Director of Canadian Studies in the Department of Transnational Studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo. An author of several acclaimed works of fiction and non-fiction, Foster is one of Canada’s leading public intellectuals on issues of citizenship, culture, multiculturalism, politics, race, ethnicity and immigration. His fiction is often described as post-colonial in terms of the Caribbean. According to the New York Times newspaper (Nov. 5, 2002), he is one of Canada’s leading fiction voices, who depicts the immigration experience and provides a non-traditional perspective on Canada, citizenship and issues of belonging.
As a well-respected journalist and columnist, Foster has worked with major print and broadcast media in the Caribbean and Canada. In Barbados, he was a reporter/editor with Reuters News Agency Caribbean service at the time, but which later became the Caribbean News Agency (CANA) that was the forerunner to the Caribbean Media Corporation. After a stint in Jamaica at Caribbean Institute of Media and Communications at the University of the West Indies, Foster became a reporter/editor with the Barbados Advocate-News. In Canada he worked for several major media outlets including The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Financial Post, CBC Radio and CBC TV and CTV New. He was also the host of Urban Talk, a talk show on the Toronto Radio station CFRB 1010AM. He also contributed to several leading Canadian magazines, such as Chatelaine, Toronto Life, Report on Business Magazine, Canadian Business, NOW and Maclean’s. Public advocacy is important to him and is one of the threads weaving his working life.
