Salamishah Tillet
Professor of Africana Studies and Creative Writing, Rutgers University
Salamishah Tillet is the Henry Rutgers Professor of Africana Studies and Creative Writing at Rutgers University, Newark, and the 2022 Pulitzer Prize-winning contributing critic-at-large at the New York Times. She is the director of Express Newark, a center for socially engaged art and design art at Rutgers; the co-founder (with her sister Scheherazade Tillet) of A Long Walk Home, an arts organization that empowers young people to end violence against girls and women; and a founding member of the Black Girls Freedom Fund. She is the author of "Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination" and, most recently, "In Search of the Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece." Currently, she is completing a book about Nina Simone’s life and the cultural afterlife. In 2022, she received the Gracie and Webby awards for “Because of Anita,” a four-part series podcast that she co hosted and co-produced with Cindi Leive, examining the enduring impact of Anita Hill’s testimony thirty years after she appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee. In 2021, she was named Andrew Carnegie Fellow by the Carnegie Foundation of New York for her project, "In Lieu of the Law: ‘Me Too’ and the Politics of Justice," a cultural history of the world's largest social media movement.
