Seattle Arts and Lectures

Rasheena Fountain is a writer from Chicago’s west side, now living on Coast Salish land (Seattle). Her work focuses on Black environmental memory. Fountain’s work has been published in ZORA, Penumbra Online, Jelly Bucket, The Roadrunner Review, swamp pink, You Are Here: The Journal of Creative Geography, Black Embodiments Studio Journal, The Mountaineers Magazine, and more. Her forthcoming book Starfish Blues: A Memoir will be published with Chin Music Press in April of 2024. Fountain received a 2016 Outstanding Staff Award from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for her work in Student Services (2016). She is a former Walker Communications Editorial fellow with the National Audubon Society (2017). The University of Washington awarded her the Richard J. Dunn First-Year Teaching Award (2019). Fountain received a 2021 Honorable Mention from the Trillium Arts “Miss Sarah” Fellowship for Black Women Writers and was a Top 5 Finalist for the Solstice Magazine 2022 Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize for her poem “Not an ‘other’ Climate Poem”. She earned a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an MA.Ed. in Urban Environmental Education from Antioch University Seattle in partnership with IslandWood. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington Seattle, where she is currently a Ph.D. student in English literature and culture.