Prominent academic and activist Salamishah Tillet combines cultural criticism, history, and memoir to explore Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and show how it has influenced the zeitgeist. The Color Purple received both praise and criticism upon publication, and the conversations it sparked around race and gender continue today. Through archival research and interviews with Walker, Oprah, Quincy Jones, and more, Tillet captures Walker’s seminal role in rethinking sexuality, intersectional feminism, and racial and gender politics. Tillet will be joined in conversation by V (formerly Eve Ensler).
Salamishah Tillet is a scholar, cultural critic, and activist. A professor at Rutgers University–Newark and previously a professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, she is a contributing critic-at-large for the New York Times. With her sister, she cofounded A Long Walk Home, a Chicago-based national nonprofit that uses art to empower young people to end violence against girls and women. She lives in New Jersey.
V (Formerly Eve Ensler) is the Tony award winning playwright and author of the Obie award winning, theatrical phenomenon, The Vagina Monologues translated into 48 languages, performed in 140 countries along with many other plays. She is the author of a number of books including her latest best sellers, The Apology, translated into more than 15 languages, and In the Body of the World as well as The New York Times best seller, I am an Emotional Creature. She starred on Broadway in The Good Body, and most recently Off-Broadway at Manhattan Theatre Club in In the Body of the World. During the Covid 19 pandemic she helped create That Kindness: Nurses in Their Own Words presented by Brooklyn Academy of Music in accordance with theaters all across the country; a tribute to nurses during the COVID 19 pandemic. She is founder of V-Day, the 22-year-old global activist movement which has raised over 120 million dollars to end violence against all women all women (cisgender and transgender), those who hold fluid identities, nonbinary people, girls and the planet—and founder of One Billion Rising, the largest global mass action to end gender-based violence in over 200 countries, as well as a co-founder of City of Joy. She writes regularly for The Guardian.
