Salamishah Tillet

Salamishah Tillet is a scholar, cultural critic, and curator. She is the Distinguished Professor of Africana Studies and Creative Writing at Rutgers University–Newark and previously the Robert S. Blank Presidential Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a contributing critic-at-large for the New York Times, where she won the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism in 2022 and is also the author of "Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination" (2012) and "In Search of The Color Purple: The Story of Alice Walker's Masterpiece (2021). With her sister, she co-founded A Long Walk Home, a Chicago-based national nonprofit that uses art to empower young people to end violence against girls and women.