Mary Helen Washington

Washington is the 1988 recipient of the Candace Award from the National Coalition of 100 Black Women and has received honorary Doctorate degrees from Bridgewater State College, Emmanuel College, Notre Dame College, Regis College, and Marygrove College. In 2014 she received an honorable mention for the Modern Language Association's  William Sanders Scarborough Prize. In 2015 she received the American Studies Association's Carl Bode-Norman Holmes Pearson Prize for lifetime achievement.

After graduating from the University of Detroit, Washington authored many of her books. She also became involved in academia, serving as the Director of Black Studies at the University of Detroit Mercy from 1976 to 1980 and teaching at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, from 1980 to 1990, and the University of Maryland, College Park  in the early 1990s. Washington is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park in the Department of English. She was elected president of The American Studies Association and was in that position from 1996 to 1997.

After high school, Washington attended college to study history and African American literature. She earned her undergraduate degree from Notre Dame College and went on to move to Detroit to attend graduate school in the early 1960s. Living in Detroit, Washington felt deeply connected to the Black community and culture, which led her to become involved with the union activities of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM). Washington received her doctorate degree in 1976 at the University of Detroit, becoming the University's English Department's first Black graduate student.

Mary Helen Washington was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. She grew up in a conservative Catholic home during the 1950s Cold War era, and attended Catholic schools throughout her childhood. American Cold War ideologies and reformations in the Catholic Church led by Pope John XXIII heavily influenced her upbringing, but ultimately led her to challenge these views by pursuing Left-wing schools of thought.

Washington’s career as an author established her a staple of African-American literature classes nationwide. She is the author of several books of cultural criticism and literary criticism, including The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s, and has contributed to the PBS documentary series American Experience.

Mary Helen Washington (born January 21, 1941, in Cleveland, Ohio) is an African American literary scholar and the author of numerous books on the African-American female experience. She is best known for her influence on increasing representation of Black authors in education and in literary schools of thought. Washington is a past president of the American Studies Association, and an experienced English professor.

Washington's work often integrates ideas of feminism and communism according to Black female experience. In her essay “Feminist Roots” published in Women's Review of Books, she critically engages with feminism’s relation communism, connecting Black feminist movements to 1930s communist labour initiatives. Washington has written four anthologies, each with different focuses under the broader idea of promoting Black female literature.