[1] She earned her undergraduate degree from Notre Dame College and subsequently moved to Detroit to attend graduate school in the early 1960s.
[4] In her book The Other Blacklist, Washington reflects that her anti-communist upbringing triggered her interest in communist theory and its connection to Black literature.
Black-Eyed Susans is a collection of ten stories meant to challenge the stereotypes of servant, wife and mother associated with Black women.
[10] Five years later, Washington published Midnight Birds as a revision of Black-Eyed Susans that focuses on various aspects of contemporary Black women writers’ experience, exploring issues of poverty, abuse, mental illness and sexuality.
Washington focuses on the lived experiences of influential Left Black literary figures such as Lloyd Brown and Gwendolyn Brooks.
Her analysis focuses on archives materials, including interviews and FBI files, to push the literary canon to better represent the role of Black authors in shaping American culture.
In 2015, Washington received the American Studies Association's Carl Bode-Norman Holmes Pearson Prize for lifetime achievement.