Bio

Rasheena Fountain’s work is multidimensional. In her work, she extends blues study as an overlooked ecological and anticolonial Black expression with the environment. In her multimodal and interdisciplinary dissertation, In the Dropped Down (qWátub) Aftermath: An Anticolonial and Ecological Blues, she joins scholars, writers, and musicians who have sought a widened epistemology of the blues, which includes its often-overlooked ecological contributions and Black and Native collaboration in the blues’ inception.

 

Fountain has centered creativity in her decades-long work in environmental advocacy and social justice. Her artist interviews, creative nonfiction, poetry, and essays have been published in ZORA, HuffPost, swamp pink, You Are Here: The Journal of Creative Geography, Black Embodiments Studio Journal, Mountaineers Magazine, and more. She is  a former Walker Communications Editorial fellow with the National Audubon (2017). Fountain received a 2021 Honorable Mention from the Trillium Arts “Miss Sarah” Fellowship for Black Women Writers and was a top five finalist for the Solstice Magazine 2022 Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize for her poem “Not an ‘other’ climate poem”. She has partnered with the National Resource Defense Council (NRDC) to highlight Black environmental stories through interviews and writing and performing eco-poetry. Through a partnership with NRDC and #Ham4progress, Fountain’s poem “Hope isn’t a vacant lot” was performed by Hamilton cast member Lencia Kebede in a visual production and distributed on Hamilton and  #Ham4progress social media accounts. She wrote and performed her poem, "A Mother's Justice" celebrating Hazel M. Johnson, the Mother of Environmental Justice, for NRDC's National Poetry Month celebration in 2022. Fountain has taught nature writing workshops at the Henry Art Gallery and TreeSong Nature Awareness Retreat Center. She co-produced a poetic mixtape to Henry Art Gallery for their publication series on artistic responses to the Packaged Black art exhibit (2022). She was awarded a Barclay Simpson Scholars in Public fellowship through the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington for her digital storytelling series Sustaining For Us (2023). Her  her book Starfish Blues: A Memoir was published on April 22, 2026.  

 

Fountain earned a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a MA.Ed. in Urban Environmental Education from Antioch University Seattle in partnership with IslandWood. Fountain has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington Seattle, where she is currently a Ph.D. candidate in English literature and culture.