Salamishah Tillet

Education

Salamishah Tillet earned her B.A. in English and African American Studies in 1996 from the University of Pennsylvania, graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. She earned her Masters in the Art of Teaching from Brown University in 1997 and later, her A.M. in English and American Literature in 2002 and Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization in 2007 from Harvard University. After earning her doctorate from Harvard, Tillet returned to the University of Pennsylvania to join the faculty in the English department in 2007.

History and Background

Tillet was born into a politically conscious household in Boston, and spent much of her childhood in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Orange, New Jersey. Tillet states that both of her parents were “inspired by the Black Power movement” and that the origin of her name—Salam meaning peace in Arabic and Shah meaning royalty or kingly in Persian—was a direct inspiration from the movement during the 1970s. Tillet states, “[My parents] interpreted the [syllable] ‘mi’ as black. So of course to my parents, it’s ‘peace, black, majestic.’ But etymologically, it’s ‘peace, majestic.’”

Before arriving to the University of Pennsylvania as an undergraduate, Tillet wanted to be a lawyer. But upon taking a literature and jazz course with her mentor Farah Jasmine Griffin (now the William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African-American Studies at Columbia University), Tillet was committed to pursue academia. Tillet states that her childhood passion for literature, particularly the intersection of African-American studies and literature afforded her both “a mental home and a creative home for herself,” which also laid a foundation for her passions for literary and cultural criticism.

Tillet’s research interests include American Studies, twentieth and twenty-first century African American cultural studies and feminist theory. She has taught a variety of courses on African-American literature, Spike Lee, Nina Simone and creative non-fiction.

A Long Walk Home

In 2003, Salamishah and her sister, Scheherazade Tillet, co-founded A Long Walk Home, Inc., a 501 (c) Chicago-based national non-profit that uses art to educate and empower young people to end violence against girls and women. 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.”

Following the discovery of her sister’s story of being sexually assaulted in college, Scheherazade Tillet, then a rising college junior at Tufts University, grappled for a way to help her sister. To assist Salamishah in the process of healing from sexual violence, Scheherazade turned to social documentary photography as a way to record the various stages of Salamishah’s recovery. Upon the completion of the project, the Tillet sisters then wrote and directed Story of a Rape Survivor (SOARS), the multimedia performance on recovering from campus rape which became their flagship program. The SOARS College Initiatives now consist of the multimedia performance, public lectures, and trainings to end campus sexual assault for college students and administrators. In 2009, A Long Walk Home launched the Girl/Friends Young Leaders Institute for teen girls in Chicago, an artist-activist program for teen girls to advocate for themselves, their peers, and for gender and racial equality in their schools and communities. SOARS has presented at over 1000 colleges and in 40 states and Girl/Friends Youth Leaders have done trainings for over 10, 000 students in Chicago.

For its innovative and intersectional strategy to combat gender violence, ALWH has recently been featured in The New Yorker, NY Times, Washington Post, on CNN, MSNBC and NPR and been the recipient of major grants from the With and For Girls Collective and the NoVo Foundation. In 2010, Salamishah and Scheherazade were finalists for Glamour Magazine’s “Women of the Year” award for their work to end violence against girls and women.

Books and Publications

In 2012, Tillet published her first book entitled Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination (Duke University Press). The book examines how contemporary African American artists, writers, and intellectuals antebellum slavery within post-Civil Rights America in order to challenge the ongoing amnesia of slavery from America’s civic myths and to reimagine a democratic future.

Harvard University’s Alphonse Fletcher University Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. calls it “an original contribution” and “a dazzling analysis of the many ways slavery lives in the contemporary imagination and colors our past, present, and future.” Swarthmore College President Valerie Smith notes “This book will transform the way we think about the place of African American cultural production in relation to 'post–civil rights era' political discourse.”

The foundation of the text initially began as an independent study project on eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century slave narratives by writers like during Tillet’s undergraduate career. Furthermore, she states that Sites of Slavery “concerns itself with big questions of citizenship, race, and democracy in the post-Civil Rights era. It comes out of my desire to understand why contemporary African-American artists and intellectuals are so preoccupied with returning to theme of slavery in their works and how their representations of the past help understand our racial present better.”

In 2010, Tillet co-edited the Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters Special Issue on Ethiopia. Her academic work has appeared in American Literary History, American Quarterly, Callaloo, Novel, Research in African Literatures, and Women's Review of Books. She is currently working on a book on the civil rights icon Nina Simone.

In 2011, she wrote the liner notes for the three-time Grammy-award winning album, Wake Up!, by John Legend and The Roots. In 2013, she published Gloria Steinem: The Kindle Singles Interview for Amazon. Tillet’s work as both a news contributor and activist have led her to appear on the BBC, CNN, MSNBC and NPR, written for The Atlantic, The Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Nation, The Root, and Time. Tillet is also an associate producer of Aishah Shahidah Simmons’s groundbreaking film, “NO! The Rape Documentary.” Cambridge Documentary Films also featured her in the award-winning “Rape Is” and she is also interviewed in the documentary, “The Amazing Nina Simone.”

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 at the University. 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, NY.

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.

Personal life

Tillet is the mother of two children and lives with her partner in New Jersey.