Dr. 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, and she is currently completing the book, All The Rage: Nina Simone and The World She Made.

Tillet received the 2025 Emerson Collective Fellowship for leaders taking on a hyperlocal project to help their community come together and solve complex problems, and she is the 2025 recipient of The Gordon Parks Foundation’s Genevieve Young Fellowship in Writing. Her writing has also appeared Aperture, The Atlantic, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, and TIME, and her work has been supported by the Carnegie Foundation, the Lindback Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the Schomburg Center for Scholars-in-Residence, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, and the Mellon Foundation. 

She received her BA in English and African American Studies and graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania; received her Master of Art in Teaching in English from Brown University; and earned her Master of Art in English and her PhD in American Studies from Harvard University. She holds an honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts from Moore College of Art and Design. 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.