Participant Bios

Moderators:

Cathy Cohen

Cathy Cohen is Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Her general field of specialization are American politics, youth politics, African-American politics, women and politics, lesbian and gay politics, and social movements. In April 2005, she sponsored the first Feminism and Hiphop Conference. She is also the author of The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics.

Mark Anthony Neal

Mark Anthony Neal is Associate Professor in the Black Popular Culture Program in African and African American Studies at Duke University. He is the author of four books including What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1998), Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002) and the recent New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity (2005). Neal co-edited That’s the Joint! The Hiphop Studies Reader (2004) with Murray Forman. He is also a regular contributor to NPR’s News and Notes with Ed Gordon and Popmatters.com.

Bakari Kitwana

Bakari Kitwana is the author of The Hip-Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture. He has been the Executive Editor of The Source, the Editorial Director of Third World Press, and has taught a course on hip-hop in the Political Science department at Kent State University. A consultant for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Kitwana holds Masters degrees in both English and Teaching from the University of Rochester. His writings have appeared in the Village Voice, The Source, The Progressive, and the Boston Globe. The co-founder of the 2004 National Hip-Hop Political Convention, he frequently lectures on the politics of the hip-hop generation. His most recent publication is Why White Kids Love Hip Hop.

Elvis Mitchell

Elvis Mitchell is a nationally syndicated film critic and host of NPR’s The Treatment. In addition to hosting The Treatment for National Public Radio’s flagship Los Angeles affiliate KCRW, 89.9 FM since 1996, Elvis Mitchell was entertainment critic for NPR’s Weekend Edition with Scott Simon from the show’s inception in 1985 through 2005. Mitchell was a film critic for the New York Times for four years, starting in January 2000. Prior to that, he was film critic for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram for two years, starting in December 1997; there, he won the 1999 AASFE Award for criticism. He was film critic for the Detroit Free Press, the LA Weekly and California magazine. In 1993, he was nominated for a Writer’s Guild of America award for his contributions to “The AFI Achievement Award Tribute to Sidney Poitier.”

J. Phillip Thompson

J. Phillip Thompson III is a political organizer who worked in the Dinkins administration and continues to work with political organizations, unions and organizations dedicated social and economic justice. His academic work traces the narrowing of the political scope of black politics and the limiting of black collective action that accompanied the election of black mayors in New York, Oakland, and Atlanta. He is the author of Social Capital and Poor Communities and h is latest book is Double Trouble: Black Mayors, Black Communities, and the Call for a Deep Democracy. He is currently an Associate Professor at MIT.

Panelists

H. Samy Alim

H. Samy Alim is a “combat linguist” and author ofYou Know My Steez: An Ethnographic And Sociolinguistic Study Of A Black American Speech Community (Duke University Press, 2004) and co-author of Street conscious rap (Black History Museum Press, 1999). After teaching in Duke University’s Linguistics Program, Dr. Alim has joined the UCLA Departments of Anthropology and African American Studies as a visiting scholar for 2005-2006, where he teaches a course on “Language and the Hip Hop Cultural Movement.” His forthcoming book,Roc the mic right: The language of hip hop culture (In press, Routledge), ushers in a new research agenda, “Hip Hop Linguistics (HHLx),” which is a global, interdisciplinary approach to language and language use within Hip Hop communities. As language-centered as Hiphop is, there has been a huge void in Hiphop Studies scholarship on the very medium of the Hiphop message - its unique, innovative and powerful language. HHLx not only fills this void in Hiphop Studies and in cultural studies, but it also problematizes the work of linguists/linguistics and challenges the field to play a more direct role in social transformation.

Angela Ards

Angela Ards has covered African American cultural politics and community organizing for more than a decade. Her journalism career began at the Village Voice, where she was a writer and senior editor from 1993 to 1998, covering race and gender politics. She was the inaugural Haywood Burns Fellow at the Nation Institute, writing a series of articles documenting black activism and identifying new organizing strategies in post-civil rights America. The Nation cover story “Rhyme & Resist: Organizing the Hip Hop Generation” anticipated a national discussion in its exploration of hiphop culture as a political force. Angela has been a Revson Fellow at Columbia Fellow and a Preyer Fellow at Princeton University, where she is a Ph.D. candidate in English and African American Studies.is a contributing editor at Ms. magazine and a fellow at the Nation Institute. She is both a journalist and a media activist.

Eric Arnold

After graduating with a degree in American Studies from UC Santa Cruz, Eric became Music Editor of Bay Area-based 4080 magazine in 1993, later becoming Editorial Director. After leaving 4080, Eric became the “In the Hood” columnist for the Source magazine, writing about regional hip-hop scenes across the country, as well as a groundbreaking piece on international hip-hop in Japan. In 2000, he profiled inner-city documentary filmmaker Kevin Epps in a cover story for the SF Bay Guardian. In 2001, Eric was a consultant for Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ “Hip Hop by the Bay” exhibition, and in 2002, he was Program Coordinator for “Hip Hop and Beyond,” an academic conference held at UC Berkeley. In 2003, he began writing the “Close 2 tha Edge” column for East Bay Express; more cover stories followed, on pioneering Asian-American rapper Lyrics Born and the “ New Bay” movement. Eric has also contributed a chapter to the forthcoming Pluto Press anthology “The Vinyl Ain’t Final” (scheduled for release in 2006).

Adisa Banjoko

Adisa Banjoko is a pioneer Hip Hop journalist, speaker and author from the Bay Area. His books include Lyrical Swords: Hip Hop and Politics in the Mix and Lyrical Swords Vol. 2: Westside Rebellion- released today!! His writing has appeared in such varied domains as Vibe, The Source, XXL, Yoga Journal, Grappling, Lyricalswords.com and Allhiphop.com. Adisa has lectured at a wide range of venues including Harvard, Brown, and U.C. Berkeley as well as Vacaville State Pen and San Quentin Prisons. He was featured on NPR with Ed Gordon, discussing rap lyrics and violence, and also hosted a presentation of films on Hip Hop and urban culture at the San Francisco Black Film Festival. Adisa is a frequent guest on various radio stations in California

Robert ‘biko’ Baker

Rob ‘biko’ Baker is a Hiphop activist and writer. biko has served as the Deputy Publicity Coordinator for the Brown and Black Presidential Forum (a nationally televised Presidential debate airing on MSNBC), was a lead organizer for Slam Bush (a national rap and poetry battle which featured Hiphop heavy-hitter Chuck D), an organizer for National Hip-Hop Political Convention and as City Director for the Young Voter Alliance. Currently, he is involved in the efforts for the Campaign Against Violence, a strategic effort to quell interpersonal violence amongst the Hiphop generation. biko is also working on a PhD in History from UCLA. He has published Take Me to Your Leader: A critical analysis of the Hip-Hop Summit (Socialism and Democracy, Vol. 18, No. 2) and Afros and Mics: Revolutions of the Mind- Cultural Studies in the African Diaspora Project 1996-2002 (CAAS Publications University of California Los Angeles, 200). He is the cofounder of Contrabandit.com, a webzine dedicated to critically analyzing Hiphop culture. biko is a also a contributing writer for The Source magazine.

Ben Caldwell

Ben Caldwell is founding director of KAOS Network. KAOS is a house of art. The name KAOS Network refers to its mission: organizing chaos. Chaos is the mother load, the foundation of creation. KAOS also riffs on popular conceptions of the chaotic nature of predominantly black neighborhoods. KAOS works with all the arts using various media: teleconferencing, film, video music and sound design. Project Blowed is a collective of hip hoppers that Ben Caldwell works with that includes 22 different groups. The 22 different groups make about 150 men and women. They have been working for the last 12 years together. Ben has been working in Hiphop for the last since 1984.

Davey D

Davey D is a Hiphop historian, journalist, deejay and community activist. He is also a co-founder of the Bay Area Hiphop Coalition and a member of the Bay Area Black Journalist Association. He’s the webmaster for what is considered one of the oldest and largest Hiphop sites on the web Davey D’s Hiphop Corner.

Derrick Darby

Derrick Darby, a native of Queensbridge, is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Texas A & M University. His areas of research are social and political philosophy and African American philosophy. His most recent publication is Hip Hop & Philosophy: Rhyme 2 Reason (Open Court Publishing, 2005), a volume of philosophical essays co-edited with Tommie Shelby ( Harvard University), and with a foreword by Cornel West. This bold and novel book challenges the assumption that there is an unbridgeable gap between street knowledge and book knowledge. It also challenges the academy to encourage new and creative ways to demonstrate the virtues of a liberal arts education for an increasingly diverse student body that views itself as part of the hip-hop generation.

Murray Forman

Murray Forman is Assistant Professor of Communication and Cultural Studies at Northeastern University. He is the author of The ‘Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop ( Wesleyan University Press, 2002) and Co-editor, with Mark Anthony Neal, of ‘That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader’ (Routledge, 2004), as well as authoring articles on youth, race, popular music, television, and film.

KRS One

KRS-One, along with DJ Scott La Rock, formed Boogie Down Productions in the mid-1980s; their debut album Criminal Minded (1987) showcased KRS’ singular delivery and urgent, thought-provoking lyrics over minimal beats and samples. KRS-One is known for his furiously political and socially conscious raps, which is the source of his nickname,” The Teacher.” His name stands for Knowledge Reigns Supreme - Over Nearly Everything. He founded the Temple of Hip-Hop, a hip-hop preservation society that promotes peace. La Rock was murdered shortly thereafter, at which point KRS began to find a more political and socially-minded voice. Successfully avoiding preachy overtones, By All Means Necessary (1988) addressed safe sex and violence prevention. A regular on lecture circuits, he mentors new talent and continues to record sporadically. In 1999 he released KRS-One Presents…The Temple of Hip-Hop Kulture, a compilation of up-and-coming artists, and in 2002 he dropped Spiritual Minded, delving further into religious rap. Kristyles and Keep Right followed in 2003 and 2004, respectively.

Sheena Lester

Sheena Lester has served as Editor-in-Chief of RapPages and XXL magazines, as well as music editor of Vibe. She most recently held top-level editorial positions at 360hiphop.com and BET.com. Lester began her foray into journalism at the Los Angeles Sentinel, where she worked her way up from circulation assistant to editor while freelancing for The Source and several local magazines. Hired by Larry Flynt Publications in 1991 to oversee its flagship rap journal, Lester turned RapPages into an international sensation with its provocative mix of music, commentary and culture reporting. In the late nineties she would bring that same mix of energy and intellect to New York-based media circles—first at Vibe, then at the fledgling XXL. While at XXL, Lester conceived and produced 1998’s “A Great Day In Hip-Hop,” a recreation of Art Kane’s famous “Jazz Portrait” with over 200 rap music greats, convincing a reluctant Gordon Parks, the legendary photographer, to capture the image for posterity. SCHEMATICS is a media think tank and consulting group that conceptualizes, develops and manages creative properties across diverse media platforms

Adam Mansbach

Adam Mansbach’s most recent book is the novel Angry Black White Boy, a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2005 and winner of the Augustus Myers Outstanding Book of 2005 award. Mansbach’s previous books include the novel Shackling Water and the poetry collection genius b-boy cynics getting weeded in the garden of delights. An Artistic Consultant to Columbia University’s Center for Jazz Studies and a contributor to publications including The Boston Globe, The New York Times, Jazz Times, Wax Poetics and The Best Music Writing 2004, Mansbach the founding editor of the journal Elementary, a frequent public lecturer on race, literature, and hip hop, and co-editor of the forthcoming anthology A Fictional History of the United States With Huge Chunks Missing.

Kierna Mayo

Kierna Mayo was one of the first women editors at The Source where she worked as senior editor from 1991 - 1994 , playing an integral part in the magazine’s formative stages . Her writings—which have appeared in other national magazines including Vibe, XXL, Essence, Emerge, etc.—largely focus on hip-hop generation women’s issues. She is the co-creator and founding editor in chief of Honey magazine, a publication orginally developed to create a space for critical conversation between women of the hip-hop generation. Kierna wrote the introduction to the first collection of essays on the life and death of Tupac Shakur, entitled Tough Love, and penned the chapter on Queen Latifah to Vibe’s collector’s book, Hip-Hop Divas. Kierna was the editor of Essence Girl, an Essence magazine supplement for ‘tween and teen black girls, and is currently senior editor of Cosmogirl! in New York City. She is the mother of two boys (both still in diapers) and is working on a new baby, LikePepper, a magazine for urban women. Kierna is a graduate of Hampton University and thinks it’s deplorable that her alma mater’s administration has recently banned dredlocks for students in their business school.

Ladybug Mecca

Ladybug Mecca was a member of Digable Planets, a communal clan of poet-rappers that made “hip-hop bebob” popular in the ’90s. Alongside her two male partners she burst onto the scene like a quiet storm. “Mecca The Ladybug makes great strides in proving women in rap don’t need to scream and swagger in order to be tough and assertive,” wrote Larry Flick in Billboard magazine. The crew’s 1993 unveiling, Reachin’ (a new refutation of time and space), sold platinum and included samples from Curtis Mayfield, Sonny Rollins and other pacesetters. The trio also scored one Billboard award, among other accolades, and toured the world with the likes of Sade. On Trip The Light Fantastic Mecca bares soul and explores her journey from innocence into sense. She pairs her thoughtful words with an eclectic blend of music: breezy Afro-Brazilian rhythms cross-pollinate with hip-hop beats; fiery rock riffs and post-bop blue notes meet and prosper. Co-produced and overseen by Mecca and Nu Paradigm CEO Nkosi Gray, the set features Martin Luther, and producers include Shane Conry, Isreal, Sa-Ra, from San Francisco-based Rebel Soul Music. That child is an instrument of peace, and Trip The Light Fantastic sends “peace out” to the planet.

Nekesa Mumbi Moody

Nekesa Moody is the national music critic for The Associated Press (AP). Her focus is pop music and she also edits and assigns AP writers around the world who cover music in other genres.

Joan Morgan

Joan Morgan is a provocative cultural critic. A self-confessed hip-hop junkie, she began her professional writing career freelancing for ‘The Village Voice’ before having her work published by ‘Vibe,’ ‘Madison,’ ‘Interview,’ ‘MS,’ ‘More,’ ‘Spin,’ and numerous others. Formerly the Executive Editor of ‘Essence’, she is the author of ‘When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost– My Life as a Hip-Hop Feminist ‘, a fresh, witty, and irreverent novel that marks the literary debut of one of the most original, perceptive, and engaging young social commentators in America today. Her work appears in numerous college texts, as well as books on feminism, music and African-American culture.

William M. Patterson

William Pattersonis Associate Director/Teaching Associate of the African American Studies and Research Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Patterson is founder and co-director of the Youth Media Workshop, a digital archiving/action research project designed to teach African American young people how to use media tools to produce and manage documents of the black experience. Dr. Patterson, a trained educational policy analyst and curriculum developer has produced over sixty educational and social enrichment programs that utilize the various elements of Hip Hop culture to enrich public school and youth development curriculum across the country. Recognized as the “Hip Hop Scholar” on campus, Dr. Patterson is consistently ranked one of the top professor’s at the University of Illinois. His course development includes “Service Learning from a Hip Hop Perspective,” “KRS ONE: Hip Hop Artistry and Social Activism” C.R.EA.M.: Cash, Rules, & Everything Around Me, and the Black Power meets Hip Hop campus/community arts initiative S.P.E.A.K. Café.

Imani Perry

Imani Perry is Associate Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School. She received her Ph.D. and J.D. from Harvard University, and her B.A. from Yale College. She is the author of Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (Duke University Press, 2004) and the editor of The Narrative of Sojourner Truth (Barnes and Nobles Classics, 2005) as well as numerous articles in race, law, and cultural studies.

James Peterson

James Peterson is an Assistant Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University ( Abington College). He is a visiting lecturer and preceptor in African American Studies at Princeton University and was the founding Media Coordinator for the Harvard University Hiphop Archive. Dr. Peterson has assisted Dr. Cornel West and delivered the “Hip Hop Studies” lectures at Princeton University (2004). He has also assisted and guest-lectured in the (Marvin Gaye and Tupac) courses with Dr. Michael Eric Dyson at the University of Pennsylvania (2004/5). He has written numerous scholarly articles on Hip Hop Culture, African American Literature, Culture, and Linguistics as well as Urban Studies. He is currently working on a book that explores in detail the lyrics and life of Tupac Shakur (forthcoming, Praeger/Greenwood Press). Dr. Peterson has been featured on BET and Bet.com (The Jeff Johnson Chronicles) and published in Black Arts Quarterly, XXL, Technitions, and Lexani magazine. He has also been featured and/or quoted in Vibe Magazine (several times), Philadelphia Weekly, Southern Voices and The Wall Street Journal.

Giusseppe Pipitone

Giusseppe Pipitone is Webmaster and creator of Italy’s The Hiphop Reader, a website exploring Black Power, hiphop, art and resistance in Italy. He is author of It’s Bigger Than Hip Hop (forthcoming).

Gwendolyn Pough

Gwendolyn D. Pough is currently an Associate Professor of Women’s Studies, Writing and Rhetoric at Syracuse University. She is the author of several essays and articles as well as the book Check It While I Wreck It: Black Womanhood, Hip-Hop Culture, and the Public Sphere (Northeastern University Press). She was awarded an American Association of University Women Post-Doctoral Fellowship in 2003-2004 to complete research on her next book length project about contemporary African American women’s book clubs and reading groups. She writes fiction under the pseudonym, Gwyneth Bolton. Her novels, I’m Gonna Make You Love Me (Genesis Press) and If Only You Knew (Harlequin Books, Kimani Press) will be released in 2006. She is co-editing Home Girls Make Some Noise!: Hip Hop Feminism Anthology with Elaine Richardson, Rachel Raimist and Aisha Durham. The anthology will be published in March 2007 by Parker Publishing, LLC.

Eithne Quinn

Eithne Quinn is on the faculty at the University of Manchester. Her research interests focus on African-American popular culture and cultural studies. She is the author of Nuthin’ But a ‘G’ Thang: The Culture and Commerce of Gangsta Rap (2005, Columbia University Press).

Elaine Richardson

Elaine Richardson is jointly appointed Associate Professor of English and Applied Linguistics at Pennsylvania State University. Her research interests are in language and literacy studies, discourse and society, literacies and discourse practices of Afro diasporic cultures. Richardson received a 2004 Fulbright lecturing-research award to the University of the West Indies, Mona Jamaica for her current project Black Discourses in Popular Culture: Dancehall and Hiphop. She is author of various chapters, articles, and books on these topics, including African American Literacies (2003), Hiphop Literacies (forthcoming, August 2006) both from Routledge press. She has co-edited two collections on African American Rhetoric entitled Understanding African American Rhetoric: Classical Origins to Contemporary Innovations (2003, Routledge), and African American Rhetoric(s): Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2004, Southern Illinois University Press). Richardson is currently involved in the co-edited collection Home Girls Make Some Noise!:Hip Hop Feminism Anthology, with collaborators Gwendolyn Pough of Syracuse University, Rachel Raimist of University of Minnesota, and Aisha Durham University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Boots Riley (The Coup)

Born in Chicago and raised in East Oakland’s Funktown neighborhood, Boots became a teenage community organizer, but later switched from a clipboard to the microphone, forming the Coup with rapper E-Roc. Pam the Funkstress, the first female DJ star in the famously competitive Bay Area turntablist scene, later signed on. Their 1991 self-distributed EP landed them a deal with Wild Pitch Records. Two singles, “Dig It” and “Not Yet Free”, cracked BET and national black radio. Their debut, 1993’s *Kill My Landlord*, went on to wide acclaim. The next year, *Genocide and Juice* hit the charts, and E-Roc then left the group. 1998’s *Steal This Album*, released by indie label Dogday Records, sealed the Coup’s rep. But the band’s next record, *Party Music*, scheduled for release shortly after 9/11, became a cultural flashpoint amidst Cheney-Ashcroft hysteria. The album’s original cover (completed three months prior to 9/11) depicted the crew setting off an explosion in the World Trade Center using a guitar tuner and drumsticks. The Coup’s new album, “Pick a Bigger Weapon”, kicks off with a classic Boots Riley line—”I’m a walking contradiction/Like bullets and love mixin’…”—and then it just gets better. After a 14-year career that has defined the word “uncompromising”, the Coup return, armed with bigger funk and taller tales.

Raquel Z. Rivera

Raquel Z. Rivera is a Professor of Sociology and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Tufts University. Her groundbreaking book New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zone is of the first works that seriously studies the impact of Latinos on Hiphop music and culture and conversely of Hiphop on Latinos. She is currently co-editing an anthology with Deborah Pacini Hernandez entitled Reading Reggaeton: Historical, Aesthetic and Critical Perspectives . Her articles have been published in numerous academic journals and anthologies, as well as in magazines and newspapers like Vibe , One World, Urban Latino Magazine, El Diario/La Prensa and the San Juan Star .

Tracy Sharpley

Tracy Sharpley-Whiting is Director of African American and Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University. She teaches comparative diasporic literary and cultural movements, Francophone Studies, critical race studies, feminist theory, Jazz Age Paris, film and hip hop culture. Her books include Negritude Women, Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French , Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms. She has co-edited three volumes, the latest of which includes The Black Feminist Reader. She is currently working on two books, one on young black women and hip hop culture and the other on black women in Paris from the 17th to the 19th centuries. Her soon to be realsed hiphop book is Pimps Up Ho’s Down: Young Black Women, Hip-Hop and the New Gender Politics.

Tommie Shelby

Tommie Shelby is a philosopher and political theorist and an Associate Professor in the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity and co-Authorof the edited collection:Hip Hop and Philosophy: From Rhyme 2 Reason

Akiba Solomon

Akiba Solomon is a Brooklyn-based journalist and the co-editor of Naked: Black Women Bare All About Their Skin, Hair, Hips, Lips and Other Parts (Perigee, 2005), an anthology of personal essays and oral memoirs about Black women and body image. The Howard University graduate from West Philadelphia has been on the staff of Jane, The Source, and Essence. She is currently the Senior Editor for Vibe Vixen magazine. Her work has appeared in a range of publications, including Vibe, POZ, Suede and ColorLines.

James Spady

James Spadyis a recipient of the American Book Award and the National Newspaper Association’s Meritorious Award. His works have appeared in newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals, encyclopedias, radio, TV and film. Included among his numerous publications are a trilogy on rap music and hip hop culture: Nation Conscious Rap: The Hip Hop Vision, Twisted Tales in the Hip Hop Streets of Philly and Street Conscious Rap. Spady has written extensively on Sonia Sanchez and the Black Arts Movement. His writings have appeared in African Studies Review, International Journal of African Studies, Current Bibliography on Africa Affairs, College Language Association Journal, Black Scholar, Liberator, Hype 2, Y’Bird, Tyanaba: Revue de Ia Societe d’anthropologie, Carbet and many other publications.

Stic. Man.

In 2005 Stic.man, one half of the hip-hop duo Dead Prez, published the book ‘The Art of Emcee-ing’ under his independent publishing company, Boss Up, Inc. “There are a lot of books about the history of rap, the who’s who in the industry and gossiping,” he said. Stic’s book deals with the basics of emceeing: techniques on how to get over your writers block, how to heal your voice when you’re on the road, and much more. “There’s never been a book by an emcee about emceeing.”

S. Craig Watkins

S. Craig Watkins. In the mid-1990s S. Craig Watkins found himself among the earliest wave of Ph.D. trained scholars who grew up with hip-hop as part of their cultural experience. Since then his work has helped to establish hip-hop as a viable field of academic research. His first book, Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema (The University of Chicago Press 1998), is the first to fully explore the impact of hip-hop culture on the film industry and African American filmmakers. Scholar and cultural critic.

Michael Eric Dyson

Michael Eric Dyson says, with his second book, Hip Hop Matters, “Watkins establishes himself as one of the most insightful observers and critics of hip hop culture.” Watkins will be a Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford) in 2006-2007.

Camilla Westenberg

Camilla Westenberg is a professor in the English Department at Phoenix College. She created and teaches the course “Rap Literature: The Oral Tradition”. Westenberg holds a combined B.S. degree in Music Education and English from the University of Arkansas, Pine Bluff. She holds a Masters degree from Arizona State University, where she wrote her thesis on “Factors in Curriculum Design for Black English Speakers: Language, Community, and Institutional Influences”. Her Ed.D. is from Nova Southeastern University. She serves as an advisor to a local black poetry group. Westenberg has a special interest in comparing Afrocentric versus Eurocentric approaches to the arts, and she is currently working on a rap literature poetry book.

Ruth E. Williams

Ruth E. Williams is a Program Officer. Ms. Williams is responsible for a portfolio of media-related social justice grants and initiatives that strengthen families and empower young people through the use of information and communications technologies. A Bay Area resident since 1997, she has nonprofit, business and government experience including Deputy Director of Young Community Developers in San Francisco, a variety of San Francisco City and County positions, including Director of Operations for the Mayor’s office and Senior Project Manager at the Department of Elections. She serves on the Citizen Advisory Committee of Grants for the Arts, San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund. Ms. Williams holds a Masters of Arts degree from the University of Illinois and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Chicago.