Salamishah Tillet is the Henry Rutgers Professor of African American and African Studies and Creative Writing and the director of New Arts Justice at Express Newark at Rutgers University - Newark. She received her Bachelor of Arts in English and African American Studies and graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania, her Masters of Art in Teaching in English from Brown University, and her Masters of Art in English and American Literature and her Ph.D. in American Studies from Harvard University. Currently, she is a contributing critic-at-large for The New York Times and the author of the books, "In Search of the Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece" and "Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination." Recently, she was awarded the 2020 Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant for her memoir-in-progress, “All the Rage: Nina Simone and the World She Made.” In 2003, with her sister, Scheherazade Tillet, she founded A Long Walk Home, an art organization that empowers young people to end violence against girls and women, and in 2020, she became a founding member of The Black Girl Freedom Fund, a 10-year-initiative to invest $1Billion dollars in the lives and livelihood of Black girls and young women and their families.