Salamishah Tillet

Dr. Salamishah Tillet is the Henry Rutgers Professor of Africana Studies and Creative Writing at Rutgers University, Newark, and a contributing critic-at-large at the New York Times. A scholar, writer, and activist, Salamishah was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism this year for her learned and stylish writing and her columns in the New York Times that examined race, gender, and new works in Black art and popular culture that responded to the Black Lives Matter moment. She is a prodigious community organizer: She is the director of Express Newark, a center for socially engaged art and design art at Rutgers; 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 is 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. She is completing a book about Nina Simone’s life and the cultural afterlife. Next up in her book-writing queue are two projects: one on Serena Willams and the other, a cultural history of the Me Too movement. In 2022, she received the Gracie and Webby awards for “Because of Anita,” a four-part series podcast that she cohosted 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.