Salamishah Tillet

Salamishah Tillet is a scholar, activist, and the 2022 recipient of the Pulitzer prize in criticism. She is the Henry Rutgers professor of Africana Studies and Creative Writing at Rutgers University–Newark and a contributing critic-at-large for the New York Times. Her books are Sites of Slavery: Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post–Civil Rights Imagination (2012) and In Search of The Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece (2021). Salamishah is the executive director of Express Newark, a center for socially engaged art and design at Rutgers, and also the cofounder, along with her sister Scheherazade Tillet, of A Long Walk Home, a nonprofit that empowers young people to use art to end violence against all girls and women, and founding member of the Black Girl Freedom Fund. In 2021, she co-hosted the Webby award-winning podcast, “Because of Anita,” a thirty-year retrospective of the impact of Anita Hill’s testimony. Salamishah is currently co-curating “Pulling Together,” the first public art exhibit on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and completing a book on the civil rights musician Nina Simone.