Carrie Fountain

Born and raised in Mesilla, New Mexico, poet and novelist Carrie Fountain is the author of three books of poetry: The Life (Penguin, 2021), Instant Winner (Penguin, 2014), and Burn Lake (Penguin, 2010), winner of the 2009 National Poetry Series Award. Fountain’s YA novel I’m Not Missing (2018, Flatiron Books) is hailed as “utterly captivating, suspenseful, character-rich gift of a book” by Naomi Shihab Nye, and was a Bustle Best YA Book of July 2018. Her first children’s book, The Poem Forest (Candlewick Press, 2020) tells the story of American poet W.S. Merwin and the palm forest he grew from scratch on the island of Maui. She is currently adapting I’m Not Missing for the screen, working on a second YA novel, and finishing a third book of poems.

Her honors include the Marlboro Poetry Prize, Austin Library Foundation’s Award for Literary Excellence, a residency with the Frank Waters Foundation, and Swink Magazine’s Award for Emerging Writers. She was inducted in 2019 into the Texas Institute of Letters. Her poems have appeared in Tin House, Poetry, and The New Yorker, among many others.

She is the host of KUT’s This Is Just to Say, a radio show and podcast where she has intimate conversations on the writing life with other poets and writers.

Fountain teaches creative writing workshops across the country, and served as writer-in-residence at St. Edward’s University for a number of years, where she mentored student writers and advised graduates interested in pursuing a career in writing. She earned a BA at New Mexico State University and an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. In 2019, she was named Texas State Poet Laureate.

She lives in Austin, Texas with her husband, playwright and novelist Kirk Lynn, and their two children.