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Bio

Adam Bradley is a scholar of African-American literature and a writer on black popular culture. His commentary has appeared in the Washington Post and the New York Times as well as on NPR and C-SPAN.

Adam is the co-editor of Ralph Ellison's Three Days Before the Shooting..., the Modern Library edition of Ellison's unfinished second novel, along with Ellison's literary executor, John Callahan. At nearly 1,200 pages, this new edition goes beyond Juneteenth, the small portion published in 1999, by bringing together over forty years of Ellison's work on the novel. Adam's own critical study of Ellison's fiction, Ralph Ellison-in-Progress, will be published in May 2010 by Yale University Press.

Adam is extending Ellison's commitment to black vernacular culture through his efforts to help define the emerging field of hip hop poetics. Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop (Basic Civitas, March 2009) offers a guided-tour of rap's poetry, from the sing-song rhymes of the Sugar Hill Gang to the clever wordplay of Biggie and the dusted metaphors of Lil Wayne. Adam is also the co-editor, with Andrew DuBois of the University of Toronto at Scarborough, of the highly-anticipated Yale Anthology of Rap (October 2010), the first book to bring together the greatest rap lyrics of all time, giving them the respect they deserve as poetry.

Adam was born in Salt Lake City, Utah and was home-schooled by his grandparents until high school. He earned his BA at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, where he began working on Ralph Ellison's papers as a nineteen year-old assistant to Ellison's literary executor. He earned his Ph. D. in English from Harvard University, studying with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Cornel West. He is currently an associate professor of Literature at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He lives in Boulder with his wife.