Sa Whitley was raised in Silver Spring, Maryland and has lived in Vermont, California, and Rhode Island. They are currently based in Phoenix, Arizona where they are an Assistant Professor of Women & Gender Studies and a writer in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. They are also the Co-Director of Queer X Humanities, an initaitive at the ASU Humanities Institute, which launches in Fall 2024. They hold an A.B. in English from Princeton University, an M.A. in African American Studies from UCLA, and a Ph.D. in Gender Studies from UCLA.

Whitley is the winner of the 2024 Indiana Review Poetry Prize, a finalist for the 2024 Ninth Letter Poetry Prize, and the runner-up for Palette Poetry’s 2023 Previously Published Poetry Prize. Their recent poems appear in POETRY Magazine and are forthcoming in the aforementioned journals. They have received literary and academic fellowships from Cave Canem, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference (2022), and the Community of Writers, alongside invitations from Tin House Writer’s Workshop and Anaphora Arts. Their literary career began at W. W. Norton & Company, where they worked as an Associate Publicist from 2008-2011 before pursuing graduate studies.