Carrie Fountain

Carrie Fountain’s poems have appeared in Tin House, Poetry, and The New Yorker, among many others. Her debut collection, Burn Lake, was a National Poetry Series winner and was published in 2010 by Penguin. Her second collection, Instant Winner, was published by Penguin in 2014. She has received the Marlboro Poetry Prize and an Austin Public Library Foundation Award, and was inducted in 2019 into the Texas Institute of Letters.


Born and raised in Mesilla, New Mexico, where her family’s multicultural history is deeply rooted, Fountain moved to Austin in 2001 and received her MFA as a fellow at the James A. Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. Fountain teaches creative writing workshops across the country, and for a number of years has served as writer-in-residence at St. Edward’s University, where she mentors student writers and advises graduates interested in pursuing a career in writing. She is also 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 writes in multiple disciplines. Her novel, I’m Not Missing, was published in July, 2018 by Flatiron Books (Macmillan). Her first children’s book, The Poem Forest, forthcoming from Candlewick Press, tells the story of American poet W.S. Merwin and the palm forest he grew from scratch on the island of Maui. She’s currently at work adapting I’m Not Missing for the screen and finishing a third book of poems. Fountain lives in Austin with her husband, playwright and novelist Kirk Lynn, and their two children.