Salamishah Tillet

Salamishah Tillet was born into a politically conscious household in Boston. Inspired by the Black Power Movement, her parents, Lennox Tillet and Volora Howell, named her Salamishah, which combines “salaam”, an Arabic word for peace, “mi”, her parents’ interpretation of black, and “shah”, Persian for "king", resulting in her first name becoming a literal translation of “peace/black/majestic”.[1] Upon her parents’ separation, Tillet lived in Boston with her mother, and then after her mother was a victim of sexual assault by a serial rapist in Boston, Tillet and her sister, Scheherazade, moved to her father’s city of Port of Spain, Trinidad in 1985 where she attended Mucurapo Girls School for primary school and St. Joseph’s Convent for secondary school. In 1988, Tillet returned back to the United States, to attend Newark Academy in Livingston, New Jersey from eighth grade to the end of high school. Throughout these years, Tillet developed a deep interest in literature and spent her extra time playing soccer and running winter and spring track. While there set school records for the 300-meter and 600-meter indoor races.

After graduating high school at Newark Academy, Tillet began her undergraduate career at the University of Pennsylvania, she intended to study law. However, taking courses on topics such as jazz and literature with professors, including Professor Farah Jasmine Griffin (now the William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African-American Studies at Columbia University), transformed Tillet’s trajectory and interests. Under the mentorship of Professor Griffin, Tillet began to understand the impact of work in academia. In an interview with Kathryn Levy Feldman from the Penn Gazette Tillet states, “I didn’t grow up having academics in my family… I didn’t know you could be an English Professor, but Farah provided a lot of insight as well as a model for how I could do work that was relevant.” Along with a growing relationship with Professor Griffin and regular visits to Penn’s Van Pelt Library, Tillet declared “It was at this time that I made a conscious commitment to writing my own scholarly works in accessible language and to be politically engaged.”[2]

Tillet earned a B.A. in English and African American Studies, where she was on the dean’s list and graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Pennsylvania in 1996. The following year, she earned her Masters in the Art of Teaching from Brown University in 1997. Later, she earned her A.M. in English and American Literature in 2002 and a Ph.D. in History of American Civilization program (now American Studies) in 2007 from Harvard University. At Harvard University, Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Werner Sollors co-chaired her dissertation “Peculiar Memories: Slavery and the Cultural Imagination.”

Tillet’s childhood passion for literature, particularly in the intersection of African American studies and literature, laid a foundation for her passions for literary and cultural criticism. Her research interests include American Studies, twentieth and twenty-first-century African American cultural studies, and feminist theory.

In 2007, Tillet returned to the University of Pennsylvania to join the faculty in the English Department. There her research and courses included topics in American Studies, twentieth and twenty-first African American literature, film, popular music, cultural studies, and feminist theory. More specifically Tillet taught a number of courses, including Family Feuds: Beyonce, Jay-Z, and Solange and the Meaning of American Music, No Bench By the Road: Monuments, Memory, and the Afterlife of Slavery, “Where My Girls At?”: African American Women Performers in the 20th Century, Black Rage: Race, Affect, and the Politics of Feeling, and more.[3]

Tillet is now based in Newark, New Jersey, where she lives with her partner and two children. She teaches courses in creative nonfiction and African-American studies in the MFA program in the Department of English, Creative Writing and Department of African-American and African Studies at Rutgers University—Newark.[4]

In 2003, Salamishah and her sister, Scheherazade Tillet, co-founded A Long Walk Home, Inc. (ALWH), a Chicago-based national nonprofit that uses art to empower young people to end violence against girls and women. Through its national and local programs, Story Of A Rape Survivor (SOARS) multimedia performances and college trainings and workshops and the Girl/Friends Leadership Youth Institutes, ALWH has educated thousands of survivors and activists to build safe communities and eliminate gender violence. A Long Walk Home works with artists, students, activists, therapists, community organizations, and cultural institutions to elevate marginalized voices, facilitate healing, activate social change. Twenty years before #MeToo, A Long Walk Home emerged as a leading organization in the United States using black feminist justice approaches to combat gender violence and racism. ALWH has been the recipient of the Face History and Ourselves “Upstanders” Award,[5] the Moxie Award for Excellence and Creativity from Illinois Coalition Against Sexual Assault,[6] the Chicago Foundation for Women’s Impact Awards,[7] the Bright Promise Foundation’s Ed Marciniak Bright Star Award[8] and part of the 2nd Move to End Violence cohort—a 10-year initiative by the NoVo Foundation designed to strengthen the collective capacity to end violence against girls and women in the United States.

New Arts Justice is an incubator within Rutgers University-Newark that is committed to feminist approaches to art’s relationship to place, social justice, and civic engagement in Newark and beyond. Inspired in name and spirit by the 1968 film “The NEW-ARK,” created by poet, playwright, and activist Amiri Baraka about racial justice education, urban public theater, and political consciousness-raising in Newark, New Arts Justice keeps Newark as an artist-activist city at the core, while carefully considering its position within the university as well.  

Housed in Express Newark, under the directorship of Professor Salamishah Tillet, New Arts Justice is a joint partnership between the Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and Modern Experience and Express Newark that:

• Curates inside/outside public art installations and exhibitions throughout the city of Newark
• Supports emerging to mid-career fine artists and curators who actively practice socially-engaged art
• Promotes and publishes innovative scholarly research and data collection on art and civic engagement

Salamishah Tillet published her first book, Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination (Duke University Press) in 2012. Sites of Slavery examines how contemporary African American artists and writers represent slavery as a metaphor for the ongoing feelings of exclusion and estrangement that African American citizens have in the United States.[10] The foundation of the text initially began as an independent study project on eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century slave narratives during Tillet’s undergraduate career. Tillet says, Sites of Slavery “comes out of my desire to understand why contemporary African-American artists and intellectuals are so preoccupied with returning to the theme of slavery in their works and how their representations of the past help understand our racial present better.” [11]

American literary critic, Henry Louis Gates Jr., calls Sites of Slavery “an original contribution and a dazzling analysis of the many ways slavery lives in the contemporary imagination and colors our past, present, and future.” Valerie Smith, President of Swarthmore College, notes, “This book will transform the way we think about the place of African American cultural production in relation to ‘post-civil right era’ political discourse.”

Tillet has also contributed to a number of scholarly journals and publications. In 2010, Tillet co-edited a Special Issue on Ethiopia, Literature, and Art for The Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letter, Volume 33.[12] She has also produced chapters and articles including, “‘I Got No Comfort in This Life’: The Increasing Importance of Patsey in 12 Years a Slave”, for American Literary History 26(2),[13] “Elle Perez: On Feminism” for Special Issue Aperture 225,[14] and “‘You Want to Be Well?’: Self-Care as a Black Feminist Intervention in Art Therapy” in Art Therapy for Social Justice: Radical Intersections.[15] Tillet has also written the liner notes, “Nina Simone: The Voice of a People”, for Nina Simone Sings the Blues and “Freedom Then, Freedom Now” for Wake Up! by John Legend and the Roots.

Tillet has written the nonfiction book, In Search of The Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece, out in January 2021 with Abrams Books. Currently, she is working on All the Rage: ‘Mississippi Goddam’ and the World Nina Simone Made with Ecco Press, an independent publishing company founded by Daniel Halperin in 1971 and later acquired by HarperCollins in 1999.  

Tillet has presented her scholarly and activist work at various conferences, festivals, and seminars hosted at universities and institutions such as Boston College, Brown University, Duke University, New York University, Princeton University, and more. A few of her lectures include “‘We Would Have to Fight the World’: The Global Influence & Afterlife of the Combahee River Collective,” at the National Women’s Studies Association in Baltimore, MD, “Real Talk: On Black Girlhood and the Future of Feminism,” at the Toni Cade Bambara Scholar-Activism Conference at Spelman College, and “Black Girls in Search of Justice: The Bluest Eye, Brown v. Board, and The Fate of Black Girlhood” at Loyola University.

She has co-organized a number of projects and conferences including The Continuum Violence Project, an incubator for policyholders, activists, and academics who work on ending violence—gun control, community and gang violence, and gender-based violence, with the NoVo Foundation and Black Girl Movement: A National Conference, a three-day gathering to focus on the experiences and realities of all Black girls, cis, queer, and trans, in the United States, at Columbia University. Tillet has also interviewed Oprah Winfrey, Shonda Rhimes, Spike Lee, Kerry Washington, Ava DuVernay, Solange, Michael B. Jordan, Suzan Lori-Parks, and more. Tillet has appeared on broadcasts, radio shows, and podcasts on platforms such as MSNBC, CNN, C-SPAN, and more. Also, she has appeared in several documentaries including, Surviving R. Kelly and NO! The Rape Documentary by Aishah Shahidah Simmons.

Along with her professorship, Tillet is a cultural critic who has written for a number of publications including “Solange: The Messenger” for ELLE Magazine, “‘Black Panther’: Why Not Queen Shuri?” for Hollywood Reporter, and “Quentin Tarantino’s Exceptional Slave: “Django Unchained’” for CNN: In America. Currently, she is a regular writer for the Culture and Opinion sections of the New York Times and has written Why Harvey Weinstein’s Guilt Matters to Black Women, After the ‘Surviving R. Kelly’ Documentary, #MeToo Has Finally Returned to Black Girls, Nina Simone’s Time is Now: Again.

In 2010, the University of Pennsylvania awarded Tillet with the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Award for Distinguished Teaching by an Assistant Professor. Dr. Tillet was a 2010-2011 recipient of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Fellow for Career Enhancement. During that academic year, she served as a visiting fellow at the Center of African American Studies at Princeton University. In 2013-14, she was a Scholar-in-Residence at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture located in Harlem. In 2019, she was awarded the Badass Art Woman Award by the Project of Empty Space.

For her leadership in activism and advancing girls and women’s rights, Tillet was named as one of the “Top 50 Global Leaders Ending Violence Against Children” by the Together for Girls’ Safe magazine and America’s “Top Leaders Under 30” by Ebony.

Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012)

Gloria Steinem: The Kindle Singles Interview (Amazon Digital Services)