She has published articles with The Atlantic.com,The Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, The Nation, The Root, Time.com and regularly contributes to Elle magazine and the New York Times. She is the author of Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination (Duke, 2012) and is currently working on a book on the civil rights icon, Nina Simone. In 2003, Salamishah and her sister, Scheherazade Tillet, co-founded A Long Walk Home, Inc., a Chicago-based nonprofit that uses art to empower young people and end violence against girls and women.