Salamishah Tillet is the Henry Rutgers Professor of Africana Studies and Creative Writing at Rutgers University, Newark, and a contributing critic-at-large at the New York Times. She is the director of Express Newark, a center for art, design, and digital storytelling in Newark, NJ (supported by Rutgers), where people co-create and collaborate to advocate for social change. She is the author of Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination and In Search of the Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece, and the forthcoming, All The Rage: Nina Simone and The World She Made. Her work has been supported by the Emerson Collective, the Gordon Parks Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Lindback Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the Schomburg Center for Scholars-in-Residence, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, and the Mellon Foundation, and she is the recipient of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism.