Today’s conversation is with A.D. Carson, who teachings in the Department of Music at University of Virginia. His work as a rapper, educator, writer, and commentator deals with race, place, history, literature, hip hop, rhetorics & performance. His books include Being Dope: Hip Hop & Theory through Mixtape Memoir, COLD, and The City. His mixtape, i used to love to dream, was the first-ever rap album peer-reviewed for publication with an academic press. It received a Prose Award (Best eProduct) from the Association of American Publishers and was a finalist for the Open Access Book Prize and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Award from the American Council of Learned Societies.

His work has been published by The Guardian, Rolling Stone, Washington Post, SPIN, Los Angeles Times, Bloomberg, NPR’s CodeSwitch, Bleacher Report, and Scalawag and has been featured by Complex, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Forbes, Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, NPR’s All Things Considered, OkayPlayer, Time, USA Today, and XXL. His recent audio projects, including Owning My Masters (Mastered) and V: ILLICIT, are available to stream/download free from aydeethegreat.com.