Salamishah Tillet is the Henry Rutgers Professor of African American and African Studies and Creative Writing, the director of New Arts Justice, and the associate director of the Price Institute at Rutgers University–Newark. A contributing critic at large for the New York Times, she is the author of In Search of The Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece and Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination. In 2020, she was awarded the Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant for her book-in-progress, “All the Rage: Mississippi Goddam and the World Nina Simone Made.”
Tillet’s criticism has also been published in Aperture, the Atlantic, Elle, the Guardian, Harper’s Bazaar, and the New York Review of Books. In 2003, with her sister, Scheherazade Tillet, she cofounded A Long Walk Home, a nonprofit organization that uses art to empower young people to end violence against girls and women. In 2020, she was a founding member of the Black Girl Freedom Fund, a 10-year initiative to invest $1 billion into the lives and livelihood of Black girls and young women and their families.
Her project, “In Lieu of the Law: ‘Me Too’ and the Politics of Justice,” is the cultural history of Me Too, our nation’s largest movement to thrive outside of democracy’s most powerful instrument, the law.
https://www.salamishah.com/
