Variant Women in Literature. She contributed fiction and reviews to The Ladder. Foster lived to see her 1956 book hailed as a founding document of a new area of scholarship. She was friends with Valerie Taylor and Marie Kuda, who founded the first national lesbian writers' conference in the United States. Taylor dedicated the first conference in 1974 to Foster. In October 1974, after Foster was awarded the Stonewall Book Award, Valerie Taylor published a tribute to her in the Chicago Gay Crusader, underlining the importance of Sex Variant Women in Literature and describing it as a sourcebook not just for homophile researchers but also for literature lovers, social trends students, and those who fight for human liberation. In 1998 Foster was inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame. In 2008, the first biography of Foster, Sex Variant Woman by Joanne Passet, was published. In 2019, Foster was inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame. References 1895 births 1981 deaths LGBT studies academics American LGBT writers American librarians American women librarians University of Chicago Graduate Library School alumni Rockford University alumni LGBT people from Illinois LGBT academics American women poets 20th-century American poets 20th-century American women writers Stonewall Book Award winners 20th-century LGBT people