Sa Whitley is an Assistant Professor of Women & Gender Studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. They are also the Co-Director of the Queer X Humanities initiative at the ASU Humanities Institute. Their recent poetry is published or forthcoming in POETRY Magazine, Ninth Letter, Indiana Review, Black Warrior Review, Palette Poetry, Poetry Northwest, and Paperbag. Whitley has also received literary fellowships from Caven Canem, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Community of Writers. Recent honors include the 2024 Indiana Review Poetry Prize and runner-up for the 2024 Palette Previously Published Prize. In their spare time, they go to queer dance parties, plan desert hikes, and watch sci-fi shows that imagine liberatory and postcolonial futures.
Residency Project: The poems in Johnny Be Good are queer and intimate prisms through which to rethink urban homelessness, transmisogyny, family, home, and police brutality in soul-rending ways. Johnny Be Good enacts a mode of affective reclamation through black feminist care work in carceral, anti-black, and settler-colonial landscapes of central California and Maryland. In one arc of the book, Whitley explores the complex ways that their family members have moved in and out of the prison system and social service networks for unhoused populations. In another arc, a series of poems adds to black trans poetics, as Whitley writes about their experience with assisted reproductive technology (ART) as a black non-binary person. The two threads of Johnny Be Good connect at the messy nexus of both the challenges and the marvelous possibilities of black queer kinship formation in what Saidiya Hartman calls “the afterlife of slavery.”