Rutgers-Newark Professor Salamishah Tillet Receives Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship

Pulitzer prize-winning Rutgers-Newark professor Salamishah Tillet has been awarded the Genevieve Young Fellowship in Writing from the Gordon Parks Foundation. The foundation’s fellowship supports work on representation and social justice inspired by Parks’s legendary photography, writing, and filmmaking. 

Tillet is the Henry Rutgers Professor of Africana Studies and Creative Writing and the executive director of Express Newark, an admission-free center for art, design, and digital storytelling dedicated to social change and supported by Rutgers-Newark. Concurrently, Scheherazade Tillet, an activist and photographer, has been awarded the Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship in Art. This is the first time the foundation has awarded two siblings fellowships for their distinct bodies of work. 

In honor of photographer Gordon Parks’s historic collaboration with writer Ralph Ellison–who worked together on a photo essay illustrating themes from Ellison’s novel “Invisible Man” and another piece documenting Harlem’s Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic– Tillet will work with her sister on a series of projects exploring the themes of Black girlhood and play. 

“The Tillet sisters are a dynamic duo whose work transcends art, justice and the written word. We are pleased to be supporting their practices as two of our 2025 Gordon Parks Foundation Fellows,” said Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr., Executive Director of the foundation.

Among Parks’s most iconic images are photographs from a 1956 photo essay in LIFE magazine showing how Jim Crow laws played out in the daily lives of Black families and children, including a seminal image of Black children staring through a chain link fence at a whites-only playground.

“Play has long been crucial in the fight to end racial discrimination in the United States,” Tillet said. “For much of the twentieth century, white resistance to integration and African American demands for equality was over access to public accommodations, including playgrounds, amusement parks, swimming pools, and skating rinks.” 

Tillet and her sister will examine how Black play is ritualized and passed down across generations by following one extended family during their summer vacation at Martha’s Vineyard. 

“By writing to Scheherazade’s intimate, inventive, and beautiful portraits of how Black girls play when they feel safe and seen,” Tillet reminds us, “We might learn new ways of caring for and being with each other beyond a far more stifling societal gaze.”

Salamishah and Scheherazade Tillet worked together on the 2022 Express Newark exhibition “Picturing Black Girlhood,” an international photography exhibition featuring images of Black girls captured by Black women, genderqueer artists and Black girls themselves.  Scheherazade was co-curator, along with photographer Zoraida Lopez-Diago. Images from the exhibition will be released this year in a book published by Aperture and co-edited by Salamishah and Scheherazade Tillet.

In a career that spanned more than 50 years, Parks created a groundbreaking body of work that made him one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. Beginning in the 1940s, he documented American life and culture with a focus on social justice, race relations, the civil rights movement, and the Black American experience. He was a photographer, filmmaker, musician, and author. Last year, Tillet published the essay “‘She Was Always So Big To Us’: Ella Watson as Style and Substance” in “American Gothic: Gordon Parks and Ella Watson,” a book about Parks’s most well-known photograph. 

Said Kunhardt, Jr., “It’s an honor to be able to continue providing impactful support to artists who we are inspired by, and who share Gordon Parks’s creative goals and the mission of the foundation. Having the work of these artists in our collection, alongside Gordon’s own photographic archive, ensures that this work will be made available for future generations of artists and scholars.’’

Tillet is the 2022 winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism for her writing appearing in The New York Times, where she is a contributing critic at large.

Her essays on race in popular culture examine Black experiences, including her reaction to the art inspired by the murder of George Floyd. The Pulitzer judges called Tillet’s contributions “learned and stylish writing about Black stories in art and popular culture—work that successfully bridges academic and nonacademic critical discourse.” 

She is also the author of “In Search of The Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece, published in 2021 and is cofounder of A Long Walk Home, an arts organization that empowers young people to end violence against girls and women. Recently, she has been completing a book on Nina Simone titled All The Rage: Nina Simone and The World She Made.

Tillet said she is incredibly honored to receive the Genevieve Young Fellowship in Writing because of Genevieve “Gene” Young’s generous and rigorous legacy as an editor, and as one of the first Asian-Americans and few women in publishing dating back to the 1950s. “Contrary to what the accolades and the attention might suggest, the writer never truly does her work alone,” Tillet said. “I’ve benefited from working with some of the most extraordinary editors in the world, and my words reflect their inquisitiveness as much as they do my imagination. ”