Mary Helen Washington is the Distinguished University Professor Emerita from the University of Maryland, College Park, and a specialist in 20th and 21st century African American literature. In 1975, Washington was appointed Director of Black Studies at the University of Detroit. She was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, 1979-1980. She taught at Mills College and the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

She is the editor of Memory of Kin: Stories About Family By Black Writers, Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860-1960, and Black-Eyed Susan: Classic Stories By and About Black Women, and Midnight Birds: Stories by and about Black Women. In 2014 Washington published The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s, which explores the impact of the Left, the Communist Party, and the U.S. government spying operations on African American literature and culture during the Cold War. The Other Blacklist was awarded Honorable Mention for the 2015 William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the Modern Language Association.

Among her awards are the Lyndhurst Prize: 1994-1996, the Candace Award as one of the 100 outstanding black women of 1988, presented by the Coalition of 100 Black Women, the Richard Wright Award for Literary Criticism, Worldwise’s Featured Professor in 2012. She served as President of the American Studies Association from 1996-1997. She was awarded the Carl Bode-Norman Holmes Pearson Prize honoring lifetime achievement in and contribution to the field of American Studies by the American Studies Association, 2014.

Her current project, Paule Marshall: A Writer’s Life, a biography of Paule Marshall, will be published by Yale University Press in February 2026.