About me
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. In 2020, she was a co-founding member of the philanthropic initiative #1Billion4BlackGirls campaign. In 2023, she, with A Long Walk Home, A Call To Men, and Ta-nehisi Coates, 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 is the director of Express Newark, a center for art, design, and digital storytelling 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, most recently, In Search of the Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece. Tillet is currently completing a book on the Civil Rights musician Nina Simone.
