Professor William H. Foster III

William H. Foster III has been a writer since the age of 8 and published since age 11. Poet, essayist, playwright, and editorialist, he has written 15 books and 10 plays.

He is presently a Professor of English at Naugatuck Valley Community College in Waterbury, Connecticut.

Professor Foster has a BA from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, MA, and a Masters degree from Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT.

A long-time comic book collector and researcher, Professor Foster has been an expert commentator for both CNN News and National Public Radio. He was a consultant on the historical image of Blacks in both comic strips and comic books for the Words and Pictures Museum of Fine Sequential Art in Northampton, MA. He was also a consultant to the 2004 exhibit,“Heroes, Heartthrobs, and Horrors: Celebrating Connecticut’s Invention of the American Comic Book” presented by the Connecticut Historical Society.

His exhibit on the “Changing Image of Blacks in Comics” has been displayed at a number of venues across the country, including Temple University’s Paley Library, the 1998 Comic-Con International Comic Arts Conference, and the 2000 Festival of Arts and Ideas.  He presented his research at the 2001 bi-annual conference of The International Association for Media and History in Leipzig, Germany and at the 2002 Conference on Analyzing Series & Serial Narrative at John Moores University in Liverpool, England. He is the author of “Looking for a Face like Mine” published in 2005 by Fine Tooth Press. His new collection of essays on Black comics, “Dreaming of a Face like Ours,” was published in 2010.

Professor Foster has been an invited panelist for both the Harlem Book Fair and the Studio Museum of Harlem.

In 2007 Professor Foster’s exhibit was displayed at both the Geppi Entertainment Museum in Baltimore, Maryland and at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art in New York, New York. He was an invited speaker to the 2007 International Symposium on Langston Hughes at Central China Normal University in Wuhan, China.

In 2008 he was appointed to the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Comic Art. In 2011 he spoke at the International Popular Culture Association conference in San Jose, Costa Rica.