 She is a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, and has also taught at Chatham University and served as co-director of the Chautauqua Institution's Summer Writers Festival.Jakiela won Stanford University's William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for non-fiction for her third memoir, "Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth Maybe", in 2016.She was awarded a City of Asylum residency in Belgium in 2015.