Salamishah Tillet

Salamishah Tillet at the 2010 EMP Pop Music Conference in Seattle.

Salamishah Margaret Tillet (born August 25, 1975) is a feminist activist, scholar, and writer. She is currently the Henry Rutgers Professor of African American Studies and Creative Writing, the Founding Director of the New Arts Justice Initiative housed in Express Newark, and the Associate Director of the Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience at Rutgers University--Newark. Prior, Tillet was the Robert S. Blank Presidential Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was awarded the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Award for Distinguished Teaching by an Assistant Professor in 2010. Tillet was also an Associate Fellow for the Center of African American Studies at Princeton University and the Du Bois-Mandela-Rodney Postdoctoral Fellow for the Center for Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Michigan. In 2003, Salamishah and her sister Scheherazade Tillet co-founded A Long Walk Home, a Chicago-based national non-profit that uses art to empower young people to end violence against girls and women. Tillet is also a freelance writer for Culture and Opinion at the New York Times.

History and Background

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”, Farsi for royal or majestic, resulting in her first name becoming a literal translation of “peace/black/majestic”. 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.

When 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.”

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.

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.

A Long Walk Home

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, the Moxie Award for Excellence and Creativity from Illinois Coalition Against Sexual Assault, the Chicago Foundation for Women’s Impact Awards, the Bright Promise Foundation’s Ed Marciniak Bright Star Award 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.

SOARS (Story of a Rape Survivor)

In 1997, Tillet called her younger sister, Scheherazade to tell her that she had been raped, not just once but twice in college. That next year, while enrolled in her first social documentary photography class, Scheherazade asked Salamishah if she could document Tillet’s healing journey, which included reclamation of her sexuality, spirituality, and body. Throughout her photographic journey, both Scheherazade and Salamishah discovered ways to heal Salamishah, her family, and others. By 1999, the Tillet sisters invited a cast of black women artists to bring those images to the 90-minute performance, Story of a Rape Survivor (SOARS), a collective portrait of one black woman’s surviving sexual assault. SOARS is a unique record of black women as the earliest trailblazers in ALWH’s current movement to end sexual violence against all people. Feminist icon, Gloria Steinem, describes SOARS as “a gift that beautifully blends art, policy, and grassroots organizing to empower our most vulnerable and voiceless Americans.” Today, as millions of sexual assault victims come forward, the devastating daily impact of rape on their lives remains to be told. SOARS breaks that silence through its groundbreaking model of healing and sisterhood, and is currently being adapted into a documentary film by Yvonne Shirley.

The Girl/Friends Leadership Institute

In 2009, ALWH launched Girl/Friends, a youth-centered leadership program that amplifies the voices and creative visions of those most vulnerable to violence: girls and women of color. Created as a safety net for adolescent girls who are most vulnerable to racial and gender-based violence, Girl/Friends has been at the forefront of Chicago’s most recent campaigns to end violence against girls and young women, which includes sexual and domestic violence, crimes against queer and gender non-conforming girls, gun violence, and police brutality.

For its innovative and intersectional strategy to combat gender violence, A Long Walk Home has been featured in The Chicago Reader, Chicago Tribune, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, on CNN, MSNBC, and NPR. ALWH has also been awarded major grants from the With and For Girls Collective and the NoVo Foundation. Salamishah and her sister, Scheherazade were finalists for Glamour’s Women of the Year Award for their work to end violence against girls and women.

New Arts Justice

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

A Call to Peace

A Call to Peace was a public art and history exhibition co-curated by New Arts Justice and Monument Lab around a central question: What is a timely monument for Newark? The exhibition was conceived in response to Military Park’s Wars of America monument (1926), built by sculptor Gutzon Borglum. Borglum, famed for creating Mount Rushmore and designing a Confederate Monument on Stone Mountain in Georgia, was also affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan and used granite from Stone Mountain as the pedestal for his sculpture in Newark.

A Call to Peace includes four temporary prototype monuments by artists Manuel Acevedo, Chakaia Booker, Sonya Clark, and Jamel Shabazz, who each responded to the exhibition’s central question. The artists’ projects respectively focus on underrepresented veterans, engaging the legacies of the Confederate statues, and addressing the relationship between public spaces and historical memory. The artists were invited based on their interdisciplinary approaches to monumental work and their innovative approaches to art and social justice.

Publications

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. 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.”

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. 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), “Elle Perez: On Feminism” for Special Issue Aperture 225, and “‘You Want to Be Well?’: Self-Care as a Black Feminist Intervention in Art Therapy” in Art Therapy for Social Justice: Radical Intersections. 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 Masterpieceout 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.

Awards

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.

Bibliography

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

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

External links

1. Female Visibility Matters, Article for The New York Times Magazine, 7 August 2015.
2. Counterculture with Kweli Washington featuring Salamishah Tillet, Interview with Kweli Washington, 7 July 2015.
3. Nina Simone's Time is Now, Again, Article for The New York Times, 19 June 2015.
4. To Stop Violence, Start at Home, Article for The New York Times, 3 February 2015.
5. The Return of the Protest Song, Article for The Atlantic, 20 January 2015.
6. Passionate Present: Protecting Black Girlhood, The New School, Lecture with bell hooks, 5 May 2014.
7. Voices of Change, Penn's Women Center, The University of Pennsylvania, 5 March 2014.
8. Listen to Nina: Myth, Meme, and the Icon of a Movement, Scripps College Lecture, 26 February 2014.
9. Left of Black with Salamishah Tillet and Sohail Daulatzai, Franklin Center at Duke, 4 February 2013.
10. Opinion: Quentin Tarantino Creates an Exceptional Slave, Article for CNN, 25 December 2012.
11. Two Women: Meshell Ndegeocello's Praise Song for Nina Simone, Article for NPR, 24 October 2012.
12. My American Dream Sounds Like Nina Simone, Article for NPR, 2 July 2012.
13. Tedx Women: Gloria Steinem and Salamishah Tillet, Tedx Talks, Paley Center of Media, 8 December 2011.
14. Move to End Violence: Interviews with Salamishah Tillet and Gloria Steinem, Move to End Violence, 26 July 2011.
15. Left of Black with Salamishah Tillet and Marc Lamont Hill, Franklin Center at Duke, 6 December 2010.
16. Tillet Appearances on MSNBC
17. Articles for The Nation Magazine
18. Articles for The Root