Salamishah Tillet was named by Gloria Steinem as one the best contemporary feminist writers, and is the Henry Rutgers Professor of African American and African Studies and Creative Writing at Rutgers University, Newark, and the director of Express Newark, a center for socially engaged art and design.
She is a contributing critic-at-large at the New York Times and 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. In 2020, she received the Whiting Creative Non-Fiction Fellowship for her book in progress, All The Rage: 'Mississippi Goddam' and The World Nina Simone Made and last spring, she was named a 2021 Andrew Carnegie Fellow for her next project, In Lieu of the Law: ‘Me Too’ and The Politics of Justice, a cultural history of the world’s largest social media movement.
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, and in 2020, Salamishah became a founding member of the Black Girl Freedom Fund, a 10-year initiative to raise $1 billion dollars to invest in the lives and livelihood of Black girls and their families in the United States.