Bio

Keisha Bush was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, and is the oldest sibling of three brothers and two sisters. She received her bachelor of science degree in business management from Bentley University where she also minored in philosophy, with a particular focus in business ethics. It was her minor that was the catalyst in changing her trajectory from pursuing a law degree. During her senior year of high school, and freshman year of college, she had volunteered at the Boston Legal Services Offices for Housing, and it was that early experience of seeing civil lawyers overworked and underpaid, coupled with her minor in philosophy, that solidified her dropping her accounting major, a precursor to a corporate law degree, and deciding to go straight to work after undergrad.

After the 2004 election of George W. Bush that Keisha Bush (no familial relations) decided to take a break from America’s polarizing politics and head to Africa for the first time with a volunteer position at the YMCA, in The Gambia. Bush quickly realized that The Gambia, with its recent militant coup, regular blackouts and lack of infrastructure, was also not the place in which she felt she could have the fullest experience. This sentiment was solidified after the wrongful arrest of a young male colleague from Sierra Leon, and his subsequent torture by the local police. Bush packed her bags and overcame her fright of the harrowingly rocky, but short flight to Dakar, for a permanent move, where she found work teaching English as a second language and then eventually a position with Oxfam Great Britain, in the Dakar office.

After living in West Africa from 2004-2008 Bush returned to home, to New York City, and began working for a local LGBTQ nonprofit. It was there, that she realized that working endless hours, seven days a week, was not fulfilling in the same manner as her workweek abroad, yet she wasn’t ready to return to West Africa. It was during a period of inner searching that she realized that she had continued to write short pieces and bad poetry, starting in fourth grade, through high school, undergrad, and her four years in West Africa, but had never considered it ever being something she could, or would, pursue seriously. A year into the Great Recession Bush questioned what a writing career would look like if she gave if the same time and dedication, she had offered so many of her previous office jobs. What would a sixty-to-eighty-hour work week look like, focused solely on something she was passionate about? This question was the catalyst for what would be a complete career change along with a short three-month novel-writing course at Media Bistro, she attended held in small room at the YMCA down in SoHo, on Bowery Street.

It was in the fall of 2011, with two separate drafts of novels in hand, that Keisha began taking continuing education courses in writing at The New School. In the fall of 2013, she entered the school’s MFA program, where she was a Riggio Honors Teaching Fellow and recipient of the NSPE Dean’s scholarship. Since graduating in 2015, she has received fellowships from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Residency, the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland, Moulin à Nef in France, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and Vona. Her debut novel, No Heaven For Good Boys, is a story about the plight of the innocent children she witnessed during her tenure in West Africa, and could not forget once she returned home.