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A native son of Chicago, John W. Fountain is an award-winning journalist, professor and author of the memoir, True Vine: A Young Black Man's Journey of Faith Hope and Clarity (Public Affairs, 2003), paperback March 2005. His essay, "The God Who Embraced Me" appears in National Public Radio's book, This I Believe.
Fountain is currently a professor of journalism at Roosevelt University in Chicago.
In a journalism career that has spanned 20 years, Fountain has been a national correspondent for The New York Times. Based in Chicago. He also has been a staff writer at the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, Chicago Sun-Times, Modesto Bee, Pioneer Press Newspapers in suburban Chicago and the Champaign News-Gazette.
Until fall 2007, he was a tenured full professor at his alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he had taught the previous three years. Professor Fountain was formerly a visiting scholar at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston.
Fountain's stories and essays continue to appear in news publications across the country and overseas, including his recent poignant essay, "No Place for Me" on his disenchantment with the "Black Church," a commentary first published in the Washington Post and subsequently in newspapers across the country.