Salamishah Tillet

Salamishah Tillet is the Henry Rutgers Professor of African American and African Studies and Creative Writing at Rutgers University, Newark, and the faculty director of New Arts Justice, an institute for feminist art at Express Newark. She is a contributing critic-at-large for The New York Times, and the author of Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination and In Search of the Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece. In 2020, Salamishah was awarded the Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant for her work in progress, All the Rage: “Mississippi Goddam” and the World Nina Simone Made. She is also the founder, along with her sister Scheherazade Tillet, of A Long Walk Home, an art organization that empowers young people to end violence against girls and women. (December 2020)