Nakeysha Roberts Washington, M.S. Ed is the owner and Creative Director of Genre: Urban Arts (GUA), a platform where artists can become published digitally and in print. Nakeysha spends much of her time preparing opportunities for creatives to share their art as part of the necessity for inclusion. All of this with the knowledge that working in the space of developing yourself as a creative is often seen as a privilege. Pop-up galleries and performances organized by Nakeysha via Gene: Urban Arts allows everyone in the creative community the ability to develop themselves as artists, become published and showcase their art through performance and exhibition. GUA is now a playground for 800+ creatives, all who have their own medium in which they create— Their own Genre.

Nakeysha has been published in Routledge, various literary journals, and anthologies. In Spring 2018, she was honored with having a monologue performed in Brooklyn, New York, at the Billie Holiday Theater as part of a showcase entitled 50 in 50: What Place Do We Have in this Movement? Also in Spring of 2018, Nakeysha was a presenter at the UWM National Writing Project in which she conducted a creative writing workshop for educators. In June of 2018, a piece of her creative nonfiction entitled, “No Cream” was published in Wisconsin’s Writers: An Anthology of Nonfiction. Nakeysha’s writing and other work centers around social justice issues because she believes that it is a creative’s responsibility to interrogate and reveal the intricacies of social constructs through art.

2019 proved to be an eventful year, Nakeysha happily accepted a position as producer with her favorite podcast The Story Collider as the “Midwest Connect” producing shows in Chicago and Milwaukee. She began work on obtaining a doctoral degree in Urban Education at the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee. July 2019, Nakeysha was a presenter at the Modern Language Association’s 2019 International Symposium in Lisbon, Portugal as part of a panel to discuss culturally responsive pedagogy in relationship to the teaching of writing, an opportunity afforded to her through her connection with the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee’s ACCESS program. She also was a presenter in Baltimore, MD at the National Council of Teachers of English where she collaboratively presented Accessing Culturally Responsive Practice through Onsite National Writing Project Institutes.

Additionally, Nakeysha is an instructor at the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee where she supervises and trains Secondary English teacher candidates and also is a Literature Instructor at the Milwaukee Area Technical college.