Sa Whitley’s research projects center black feminist and spatial critiques of finance capitalism and urban planning in the neoliberal era. Their current book manuscript examines the various ways that black queer transgender women in Baltimore, Maryland have negotiated placemaking and property relations; gentrification and dispossession; alongside kinship and financial subjectivity in the afterlife of the subprime foreclosure crisis.
Whitley is also an award-winning poet and contributor to the literary arts. They are the winner of the 2024 Indiana Review Poetry Prize and the runner up for both the 2024 Ninth Letter Literary Contest and the 2024 Palette Poetry Previously Published Poem Prize. Their recent poems appear in POETRY Magazineand several others are forthcoming in Paperbag and the aforementioned literary journals. Whitley is currently a Cave Canem Poetry Fellow and a former Poetry & the Senses Fellow with the Arts Research Center at University of California, Berkeley and the ASU Center for Imagination in the Borderlands (2023-24).
Education
PhD. Gender Studies, University of California, Los Angeles
MA. African American Studies, University of California, Los Angeles
