Salamishah Tillet

Salamishah Tillet is the Distinguished Professor of Africana Studies and Creative Writing at Rutgers University, Newark, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning contributing critic-at-large at The New York Times. She is 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.” Tillet is currently completing the book, “All The Rage: Nina Simone and The World She Made.” In 2025, she received the 2025 Emerson Collective Fellowship and Gordon Parks Foundation’s Genevieve Young Fellowship in Writing. In 2003, she and her sister, Scheherazade Tillet, founded A Long Walk Home, an arts organization that empowers young people to end violence against girls and women. She is the former director of Express Newark, a center for socially engaged art and design, and the faculty founder of New Arts, a public arts studio at Rutgers. In 2023, she and Paul Farber of Monument Lab co-curated "Pulling Together," the first public arts exhibition on The National Mall. She is now curating "The Wards of Newark: Then and Now," a city-wide exhibition that explores themes of gentrification, belonging, and urban renewal.