40 Years of An American Masterpiece: The Making and Meaning of ‘The Color Purple’

40 Years of An American Masterpiece: The Making and Meaning of ‘The Color Purple’

Salamishah Tillet
Africana Studies Visiting Research Associate
Henry Rutgers Professor of Creative Writing and African American and African Studies
Rutgers University, Newark

A scholar, writer, and activist, Salamishah Tillet is a contributing critic at large for The New York Times where she has been writing since 2015. She writes about popular culture, politics, gender, sexuality, and race, and before The Times, wrote about politics and culture for The Nation and The Root. She is the author of In Search of the Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece (Abrams, 2021), and Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination (Duke University Press, 2012). She is the co-host and co-producer of “The Because of Anita” podcast with Cindi Leive of The Meteor.

Currently, she is the Henry Rutgers Professor of Creative Writing and African American and African Studies and the director of Express Newark, the Center for Socially Engaged Art and Design at Rutgers University - Newark. Upon arriving at Rutgers, she founded New Arts Justice, an initiative for feminist approaches to public art in the City of Newark.