By Rasheena Fountain. Climate Conscious Collabs Press, 2026.

Rasheena Fountain’s sweeping memoir centers on stories of Black migration, exploration, and relationships to nature and place. Through a series of letters, poems, and essays that take blues-inspired leaps across time, she reflects on the movements of her ancestors and on her own journeys: from Chicago to Seattle, from city life to nature conservation, and from silence into songwriting. In Starfish Blues, Fountain seeks something “much bigger than representation,” a recouping of ancestral visions of freedom for herself and her daughter, and a life that has room for her queerness, her womanhood, her full self.

Rasheena Fountain centers environmental advocacy and 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 has received fellowships and support from the Jack Straw Writers Program, National Audubon, and Sundress Academy for the Arts. Her film, Dropped Down Blues, debuted in the “How We Carry Water” 2024 exhibit at PRAx. In 2025, she released, In the Aftermath, a blues guitar and poetry performance set. Fountain has a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, an M.A.Ed. from Antioch University Seattle/IslandWood, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington, where she studies blues and environment as a PhD candidate in English.