The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is pleased to announce Keith S. Wilson, Yoalli Rodríguez, Rasheena Fountain, and M. K. Thekkumkattil as the recipients of our Spring 2026 Residency Fellowships. These residencies are designed to give artists time and space to explore their creative projects in a quiet and productive environment.
Black and/or Indigenous Writers Fellowship Recipient
Keith S. Wilson is a poet, game designer, and multimedia artist. He is an Affrilachian Poet and a Cave Canem fellow and a recipient of an NEA Fellowship, a Kenyon Review Fellowship, and a Stegner Fellowship. Additionally, he has received fellowships or grants from Bread Loaf, Tin House, and the MacDowell Colony. His first book, Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love (Copper Canyon), was recognized by the New York Times as a best new book of poetry. His second book, Games for Children (Milkweed Editions), was a winner of the National Poetry Series.
Fellowship for LGBTQIA+ Writers Recipient
Yoalli Rodríguez (she/they) was born and raised in Puebla, Mexico. They are an Assistant Professor in Latin American and Latino Studies at DePaul University. They are a member of the Decolonial Feminist Network in Mexico. They were awarded the 2021 National Women Studies Association and University of Illinois Press (NWSA/UIP), First Book Prize. Their book manuscript (under contract with University of Illinois Press) is titled tentatively “Grieving Geographies, Mourning Waters: Race, Gender, and Environment on the Coast of Oaxaca, Mexico.” When they are not teaching or doing research, they collect records and select music in Chicago and Mexico. They have published texts in both Spanish and English about ecological grief, mestizaje, anti-colonial thinking, and decolonial feminism in Latin America, particularly in Mexico.
Rasheena Fountain has centered creativity in her decades-long work in environmental advocacy and justice. Her work includes artist interviews, creative nonfiction, poetry, and essays, and multimedia work. She is a former Walker Communications Editorial fellow with the National Audubon. 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. Her “Dropped Down Blues” multimedia project was featured in the “How We Carry Water” Exhibit at PRAx at Oregon State University in the Fall of 2024. Fountain 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. Fountain has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington Seattle, where she is currently a Ph.D. candidate working on a dissertation focused on blues performance and environmental justice and a climate blues guitar and poetry album.
SmokeLong Quarterly Fellowship for Trans Writers Recipient
M. K. Thekkumkattil (they/them) is a trans, disabled, kinky writer and nurse whose liberation is bound up with Palestinian Liberation. They write about care work, kink, relationship with land, among other things. They received a Rasmuson Foundation Individual Artist Award and fellowships from Queer Art Mentorship, Lambda Literary, VONA, and Writing by Writers. Their work can be found in Black Warrior Review, smoke and mold, ___figuration, Autostraddle, Fence Magazine, Year Round Queer, & In the Future There Are No Hospitals.
Finalists for this year’s fellowships were Jo Bear, Charlene A. Carruthers, Haile Cole, Sydnee Coore, Aliyah Curry, Maryhilda Ibe, Atlas A. Lee-Reid. February Spikener, Kirya Traber, and Matthew Valdivia.
