Writing with Faith

CMU alumnus Jamar Thrasher trades communications career for creative writing

Jamar Thrasher has been writing his entire life — as a middle and high school student, as a business reporter, as a graduate student and even as press secretary for the Pennsylvania state government.

He’s written for many different publications and platforms and has crafted compelling stories for a wide range of audiences.

The only problem? They were never the stories he wanted to tell.

So in 2023, Jamar decided to pivot his communications career to focus on becoming a novelist.

“I was in my office and I thought about all that I had been through and all that I had experienced,” Jamar, who’d been working as the press secretary and deputy communications director for environmental justice at the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, says. “I then thought, if I want to focus on creative writing, on that artistry specifically, then I have to push my writing beyond writing press releases.

“And then I got back to my roots as a fiction writer, when I was in high school. Back then, I dreamed of writing the great American novel.”

Believing his writing had become stiff, Jamar applied to attend an online creative writing course offered by the Shipman Agency and taught by Zain Khalid, a 5 Under 35 honoree by the National Book Foundation and the author of “Brother Alive.”

“He really taught me how to be a writer that's ready for publication,” Jamar says. It was in this workshop that he began writing his novel which he says is an experimental love story spiked heavily with magical realism.

With Zain’s encouragement, he applied for — and was accepted to — the 2024 class of Periplus Fellows. Periplus — a highly selective mentorship collective serving U.S. writers who are Black, Indigenous or people of color — pairs each fellow with a mentor who is an established fiction author.

Jamar’s mentor, Laura van den Berg, who was named America’s best young writer by Salon early in her career, met with him monthly to provide advice and support.

“We talked about industry politics, we talked about editing and revision,” Jamar says. “Laura helped me prioritize creating a discipline of writing consistently in order to complete a manuscript.”

Jamar also participated in the Center for Black Literature’s 2024 Wild Seeds Retreat for Writers of Color. And he volunteered at The Legacy Awards hosted by The Hurston/Wright Foundation, which recognize efforts to support and sustain Black literature.

Each opportunity has drawn him closer to the things that matter most to him — especially his Christian faith.

“I've honestly been blessed to get reacquainted with this gift that I have of writing creatively, to tell the stories that I want to tell, the stories that God puts on my heart.” he says.

In addition to his faith, Jamar is driven by his upbringing and his family.

He grew up in Pittsburgh’s East Liberty neighborhood, during its most intense period of gang violence. Despite neighborhood challenges, he says that he was surrounded by a community and family with a lot of love  — and a lot of books.

“Books became an outlet,” he says. “I was able to use my imagination. I was able to really further my understanding of the world around me. Even if I couldn't afford to travel to a place, I was there when I was reading it.”

When it became time for him to pick a high school to attend, his mother encouraged Jamar to apply to the literary arts program at the Pittsburgh High School for Creative and Performing Arts. It was here that the director of the program, Mara Cregan, told him that he should consider writing as a career.

“That was something that was important to my development as a writer,” he says. “I had done some stuff in middle school, like the middle school student newspaper where I was an editor, but in high school I really got the in-depth knowledge of what it took to be a writer and the different genres that I could write in.”

Today, Jamar runs the public relations and consulting firm, Kennedy Blue Communications. He founded the firm in 2012 while he was a graduate student at CMU — and a father-to-be.

“I founded Kennedy Blue Communications because I wanted to provide a legacy,” Jamar, who earned a master’s degree in public policy and management in 2014 from Heinz College, says. Jamar’s daughter, Kennedy, is the namesake of the company.