Pulitzer Prize winner to deliver Stone lecture
Salamishah Tillet will speak Nov. 11 at the Sonja Hanes Stone Center for Research in Black Culture and History.
Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Salamishah Tillet will deliver the annual Stone Memorial Lecture at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 11, at Carolina’s Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Research in Black Culture and History.
Tillet is a contributing critic at large at The New York Times and a distinguished professor of Africana studies and creative writing at Rutgers University-Newark. She is the author of multiple books (including “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 is completing the book, “All The Rage: Nina Simone and the World She Made.”
In 2003, she and her sister, Scheherazade Tillet, founded A Long Walk Home, an arts organization that empowers young people to end violence against girls and women.
Tillet received the 2025 Emerson Collective Fellowship for leaders taking on a hyperlocal project to help their community come together and solve complex problems and is the 2025 recipient of The Gordan Parks Foundation’s Genevieve Young Fellowship in Writing.
Her writing has also appeared in Aperture, The Atlantic, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, The Nation, The New York Review of Books and Time. Her work has been supported by the Carnegie Foundation, the Lindback Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the Schomburg Center for Scholars-in-Residence, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars and the Mellon Foundation.
Tillet also received her undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania. She has Master of Arts in English and teaching in English from Brown University, and a doctorate in American studies from Harvard University. She holds an honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts from Moore College of Art and Design.
“The Sonja Haynes Stone Memorial Lecture stands as a living tribute to Dr. Stone’s visionary legacy — as a scholar, teacher, and community builder who understood that knowledge and the arts are engines of liberation,” said LeRhonda Manigault-Bryant, director of the Stone Center. “Since 1994, this annual gathering has invited students, faculty and our broader community to think critically, act boldly, and honor the transformative power of education that Dr. Stone so passionately championed.”
Interested members of the campus community should RSVP for the event.
