Helen Montague Foster, MD is a poet, novelist, and Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. Before her retirement, she was a Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry of Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine. For thirty years she worked in private practice as a psychiatrist specializing in the psychotherapy of adults, served as president of both the Richmond Psychiatric Society and the Psychiatric Society of Virginia, and edited an e-mail listserve for psychiatrists in Virginia. In October 2003, Dr. Foster received the Jane F. Deringer Award for overall best at the 22nd Annual Chesapeake Writers Conference, also winning first place for poetry and adult fiction. Her poems have appeared in JAMA, Rattle, Tuck Magazine, Pharos, Hektoen International, and Citizen Jane. Several of her unpublished novel manuscripts placed or were finalists in the Faulkner-Wisdom Competition, the James River Writers Best Unpublished Novel Competition, and The River City Publishing First Novel Award. A book-length historical fiction manuscript, Crossing the Same Sea, placed second in the novel category in the 2020 William
Faulkner Literary Competition and was published by Atmosphere Press in 2023 as The Silent Hen. Her second novel, Lost Graces, won the Atmosphere Press Book of the Year award for 2024. Her third novel, Tidal Overlook, was released in 2025.
She and husband Thomas C. Foster have two married children and four grandchildren and split their time between Williamsburg and Middlesex County, Virginia, where they canoe on the tidal Rappahannock River.
