Pell Lecture on the Arts & Humanities with keynote speaker Salamishah Tillet

Please join us for the City’s annual Pell Lecture on the Arts & Humanities. You are not only welcome but encouraged to join us for this free event on Monday April 14 for dinner and what will be about a 2-hour program featuring keynote speaker Dr. Salamishah Tillet.

Hosted by the City of Providence Department of Art, Culture & Tourism (ACT), this year’s Pell Lecture on The Arts & Humanities explores how we remember and interpret history through monuments and memorials. On April 14, join us for this free event for dinner in welcoming Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and public art scholar Salamishah Tillet for a keynote lecture and a dialogue with Providence Commemoration Lab Seeing Monuments instructor and the Co-Director of the Project’s Inventory initiative, Dr. Renee Ater. Read more about the event here.

Doors open at 5:30 pm, with the program beginning promptly at 6:00 PM. Registration is required, as seating and food is limited. For more information about the Pell Lecture Series and to reserve tickets, please visit the registration website. 

A scholar, writer, and activist, keynote was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2022 for her work as a contributing critic at large for The New York Times where she has been writing since 2015.

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 was the co-host and co-producer of “Because of Anita” podcast with Cindi Leive of The Meteor. In 2022, “Because of Anita” won Webby and Gracie awards.

She was awarded the 2020 Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction fellowship for her cultural memoir, All The Rage: Nina Simone and the World She Made. In May, she was named a 2021 Andrew Carnegie Fellow by the Carnegie Corporation of New York for her next project, In Lieu of the Law: “Me Too’ and The Politics of Justice, a cultural history of the world’s largest social media movement. She was recently named the 2025 recipient of The Gordon Parks Foundation’s Genevieve Young Fellowship in Writing.

She is the Henry Rutgers Professor of Creative Writing and Africana Studies and the executive director of Express Newark, a 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.

With her sister, Scheherazade Tillet, she founded A Long Walk Home, an arts organization that empowers young people to end violence against girls and women.

She received her Bachelor of Arts in English and African American Studies and graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania, her Master of Art in Teaching in English from Brown University, and her Masters of Art in English and her Ph.D. in American Studies from Harvard University. She holds an honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts from Moore College of Art and Design.