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 art, design, and digital storytelling supported by Rutgers in Newark, NJ, where people co-create and collaborate to advocate for social change. 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 completing All The Rage: Nina Simone and The World She Made. Her writing has appeared in several publications, including Aperture, The Atlantic, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, and Time. She recently contributed an essay to American Gothic: Gordon Parks and Ella Watson (2024), published by The Gordon Parks Foundation, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and Steidl, and Devin Allen: Baltimore (2025), published by The Gordon Parks Foundation, and Steidl.
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. In 2020, she was a founding member of the philanthropic initiative #1Billion4BlackGirls campaign. In 2023, she, with A Long Walk Home, A Call To Men, Ta-nehisi Coates, Jelani Cobb, and Kamilah Forbes, founded the Courage Fund to raise awareness and provide resources to those dedicated to ending sexual violence against women and girls in the United States.
She and Cindi Leive of the Meteor co-hosted and co-produced the “Because of Anita,” a four-part series podcast about the thirty-year impact of Anita Hill’s historic testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. In 2022, “Because of Anita” won the Webby and Gracie awards. In 2023, she and Paul Farber of Monument Lab curated "Pulling Together," the first public art exhibition ever on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
Her work has been supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Lindback Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the Schomburg Center for Scholars-in-Residence, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, and the Mellon Foundation. Tillet graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude with her BA in English and African American Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and received her Master in the Art of Teaching degree from Brown University, a Master of English and American Literature degree, and a Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization from Harvard. In 2023, she received an honorary fine art doctorate from Moore College of Art and Design.
