Salamishah Tillet is the faculty director of the New Arts Justice Initiative of Express Newark, Henry Rutgers Professor of African American and African Studies and Creative Writing, and the Associate Director of the Clement Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience at Rutgers-Newark.

She is a leading scholar of American and African-American Studies, a regular critic and Opinion writer for the New York Times, a foremost feminist activist. Through her integration of creative writing, academic scholarship and political organizing, she has spent her career championing artists and building non-profit institutions that promote art as a powerful catalyst for social change.

In 2003, she and her sister, Scheherazade Tillet, co-founded A Long Walk Home, a Chicago-based nonprofit that uses art to empower young people to end violence against all girls and women and is the subject and writer of the "Story of A Rape Survivor" multimedia performance.

She is the author of Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination and is currently writing the cultural memoirs, In Search of 'The Color Purple': The Story of Alice Walker's Masterpiece and The World Nina Simone Made.

Tillet received her Ph.D. in the History of American Studies and A.M. in English from Harvard University and her M.A.T. from Brown University. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Pennsylvania where she received her B.A. in English and Afro-American Studies.