Fitsum Areguy is a writer, researcher, and cultural worker living in Southwestern Ontario. He is the co-founder and co-director for Textile, a hyper-local arts collective and publisher based in Kitchener, ON.
His experience spans multiple sectors and roles, including youth worker, independent facilitator, recreation therapist, community psychologist, mediator, and knowledge broker. This inter-disciplinary background shapes his critical journalism, which interrogates power structures and maps pathways for change. Through investigations into issues such as policing, health equity, migration, and extractive industries, his work has driven accountability processes and amplified grassroots solutions.
His reporting and investigations have been featured in the Toronto Star, CBC, ByBlacks, The Breach Media, Waterloo Region Record, and Canadian Dimension. With Jeff Outhit, he was a runner-up for an Ontario Newspaper Award in 2020 for their analysis revealing COVID's disproportionate effects within marginalized communities.
His place-based essays and poetry navigate presence and absence, exploring the politics of identity, belonging, and survival. His critical and creative writings have appeared in Briarpatch Magazine, Guernica Editions, New Sociology, Canadian Dimension, The Community Edition, and Korea Exposé, among others. Areguy is working on an essay collection titled Mining Blackness, with funding support from the Ontario Arts Council and Waterloo Region Community Foundation.