Salamishah Tillet facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Salamishah Margaret Tillet
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Tillet in 2010
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| Born | August 25, 1975 |
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Notable work
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Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post–Civil Rights Imagination |
| Awards | Pulitzer Prize for Criticism (2022) |
Salamishah Margaret Tillet (born August 25, 1975) is an American scholar, writer, and feminist activist. She is the Henry Rutgers Professor of African American Studies and Creative Writing at Rutgers University–Newark, where she also directs the New Arts Justice Initiative. Tillet is also a contributing critic-at-large at The New York Times.
In 2003, Salamishah co-founded A Long Walk Home, a Chicago-based non-profit that uses art to empower young people to end violence against girls and women. Tillet received the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2022 for "learned and stylish writing about Black stories in art and popular culture–work that successfully bridges academic and nonacademic critical discourse."
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Early life and education
Tillet was born in Boston, Massachusetts to Lennox Tillet and Volora Howell. Her name, Salamishah, combines "salaam", the Arabic word for peace; "mi", her parents' interpretation of black; and "shah", a Persian royal title. Upon her parents' separation, she lived in Boston with her mother. ..... In Port of Spain, Tillet attended Mucurapo Girls School and St. Joseph's Convent. In 1988, Tillet returned to the United States, where she lived in Orange, New Jersey and attended Newark Academy in Livingston. During her high school years Tillet developed an interest in literature, played soccer, and ran track. She set school records for the 300-meter and 600-meter indoor races.
Tillet attended the University of Pennsylvania, where she originally intended to study law. However, taking courses on topics such as jazz and literature with professors such as Farah Jasmine Griffin, transformed Tillet's trajectory and interests. Under the mentorship of 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." At this time, Tillet "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 from Penn, graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1996. The following year, she earned her Master of Arts in Teaching from Brown University. In 2002, she earned an A.M. in English and American Literature from Harvard University. She subsequently earned a Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization (now American Studies) in 2007, also from Harvard. At Harvard, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Werner Sollors co-chaired her dissertation, "Peculiar Memories: Slavery and the Cultural Imagination."
Career
Tillet returned to the University of Pennsylvania in 2007 to join the faculty in the English Department. Her research and courses there included topics in American studies, 20th and 21st-century African American literature, film, popular music, cultural studies, and feminist theory. Tillet's courses included 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, and Black Rage: Race, Affect, and the Politics of Feeling.
Tillet 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.
Tillet is based in Newark, New Jersey, where she lives with her partner and two children.
A Long Walk Home
In 2003, Salamishah and her sister Scheherazade Tillet co-founded A Long Walk Home (ALWH), a Chicago-based nonprofit that uses art to empower young people to end violence against girls and women. Through its programs, multimedia performances and college workshops, ALWH has educated 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, and 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. .....
The Girl/Friends Leadership Institute
In 2009, A Long Walk Home launched Girl/Friends, a youth-centered leadership program that amplifies the voices and creative visions of 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 ..., 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. It was inspired by poet and activist Amiri Baraka's 1968 film The NEW-ARK and concerns racial justice education, urban public theater, and political consciousness-raising in Newark.
Housed in Express Newark, under the directorship of 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.
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. Tillet was a 2010-2011 recipient of a Career Enhancement Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. During that academic year, she served as a visiting fellow at the Center of African American Studies at Princeton University. From 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 ... Art Woman Award by the Project of Empty Space.
For her leadership in activism and advancing girls' and women's rights, Tillet was named 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.
