Meet Sakena Jwan Washington, Chatham’s New Emerging Black Writer-in-Residence
Sakena Jwan Washington poses for a photo in front of Lindsay House, where Chatham's creative writing program is based. (Mick Stinelli)
Sakena Jwan Washington joined Chatham University this semester as the latest Emerging Black Writer-in-Residence.
The position, which is part of Chatham’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program, features and supports young Black writers, who teach a course at the University, give a lecture on craft, and publish a chapbook as part of the residency.
Washington, a native of the North Hills, held a number of jobs before she started publishing personal essays. She had an internship at Essence magazine, and she never got a byline. In the early 2000s, she worked jobs in basic cable television, where she scheduled airtime for advertisements and infomercials. When she came back to Pittsburgh in 2009, she learned to code and did copywriting for healthcare and higher education institutions.
She said things really changed when, in 2019, she submitted an opinion piece to Huffington Post, the online news outlet. She wrote an article that tried to wrangle with the implications of a study put out by the city’s Gender Equity Commission, which bluntly stated that Black women in Pittsburgh were statistically more likely to have better life prospects if they moved to just about any other comparable city in the U.S.
“As a Black woman from Pittsburgh who also happens to be the mother of a Black girl, my first inclination was to throw all of our belongings into a moving truck and drive to D.C. where my husband’s family lives,” Washington wrote in her essay.
“That [essay] opened a whole new world to me,” she said in an interview at Chatham’s Shadyside Campus. “I started pitching more, writing more, and thinking about what I wanted to do creatively, as far as creative nonfiction essays.”
She published another essay a month later in Reactor magazine. After that, she wrote a piece for the Jellyfish Review. She followed that up with a publication in Bellevue Literary Review. She also gained more writing experience doing crisis communications for Carnegie Mellon University amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Anjali Sachdeva, assistant professor of creative writing, oversees Chatham’s Emerging Black Writers-in-Residence program. “I feel strongly that, because Black writers and artists in Pittsburgh are under-supported, we would do well to focus on the greater Pittsburgh area, because there’s plenty that should be done there in terms of giving more support to Black artists,” Sachdeva said. “And we have so many amazing Black artists in the city.”
She said the program is an asset to the students, who get to learn from the writer-in-residence in classrooms and lectures, and it helps support writers like Washington in their careers with monetary support and academic experience.
It’s not Washington’s first time at Chatham. She still remembers coming to the campus when she was around eight years old for a summer day camp, where she tumbled down Chapel Hill, grabbed lollipops from the dining hall, and made crafts.
“We would do everything from pinecones and peanut butter rolled in birdseed to creating pieces of art with paint and glitter,” she said.
Washington said she plans on working some of those memories into her writing, potentially for inclusion in the chapbook. But what she’s most looking forward to during her residency is the teaching, she said.
“I’ve only taught one time before, and that was in grad school, because I had to in order to graduate,” she said. “I’m really excited about creating a safe space for other students and writers where they can be unafraid to fail.”
Learn more about the Emerging Black Writers-in-Residence program and Chatham’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing degree at chatham.edu.
You can support Black artists in Pittsburgh by donating to the residency program here.