Author Talk with Robin Foster

Name: Author Talk with Robin Foster
Start: 2025-09-19T17:30:00-04:00
Location: 27 Staples St, Old Orchard Beach, ME, United States, Maine 04064

Schedule

Fri, 19 Sep, 2025 at 05:30 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

27 Staples St, Old Orchard Beach, ME, United States, Maine 04064 | Old Orchard Beach, ME

Join us on Friday, September 19 at 5:30pm for an Author Talk with Robin Foster. She’ll be here to discuss her book Grit & Ghosts: Following the Trail of Eight Tenacious Women across a Century.
Copies of the author’s books will be available for purchase & signing at this event. This program is free, open to the public, and no registration is required.

About the book:
As a student and teacher of history, Robin Foster is well aware that humans have persisted through major hardships as long as they have existed. When faced with the anxious dread many felt at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Foster began seeking stories of tenacious women of the American West who had survived their own hardships in a world that threw the unexpected at them. During one of the most uncertain periods of her life, Foster hit the road, embarking on a journey to find these determined women of the past and finding herself along the way. Grit and Ghosts tells the stories of eight women who speak to a shared human experience of struggle, and the grit required to move through it.
Landscape and memory become deeply intertwined throughout Grit and Ghosts as Foster wanders through park ranger Marguerite Lindsley’s Yellowstone, through Mexican faith healer Teresa Urrea’s Sonoran Desert, and through author Gertrude Stein’s deeply altered Oakland. Part excavation, part resurrection, Grit and Ghosts is permeated with the individual and collective memories of Foster and her subjects, like ghosts of history.

About the author:
Robin Foster studied creative writing at Bennington Writing Seminars and has a PhD in American Studies from Rutgers University-Newark. She is the author of GRIT AND GHOSTS: FOLLOWING THE TRAIL OF EIGHT TENACIOUS WOMEN ACROSS A CENTURY (Nebraska Press Bison Books, 2024); Carl Van Doren: A Man of Ideas (National Indie Excellence Awards Finalist for 2019); and The Age of Sail in the Age of Aquarius: The South Street Seaport and the Crisis of the Sixties (2016). Her work has been published in Rooted2: The Best New Arboreal Nonfiction, Another Chicago Magazine, Goats Milk Magazine, and the Journal of Urban History.