Adam Bradley

Adam Bradley is a New York Times best-selling author on popular culture and a scholar of African American literature. His commentary has appeared on PBS, NPR, and C-SPAN as well as in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.

Adam is the author or editor of several books, including Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop, The Anthology of Rap, Ralph Ellison's Three Days Before the Shooting. . ., and Ralph Ellison in Progress. In 2011, he collaborated with the rapper and actor Common on Common's memoir, the national best-seller One Day It'll All Make Sense.

Adam's latest book, The Poetry of Pop (Yale University Press, 2017), encompasses a century of recorded music. In it, Bradley traces the song lyric across musical genres from early twentieth century Delta blues to mid century rock ‘n’ roll to today’s hits. As Bob Dylan’s recent win of the Nobel Prize in Literature suggests, an assessment of the popular music lyrics’ value as art is timely and resonant. At once a work of musical interpretation, cultural analysis, literary criticism, and personal storytelling, The Poetry of Pop illustrates how words and music come together to produce compelling poetry, often where we least expect it.

What unites Adam's work is his belief that the most powerful cultural expressions are equally the product of tradition and innovation. This vernacular process of fusing the inherited or even the imposed with the imagined helps explain the beauty we find in everything from a classical symphony to a gutbucket blues, from an epic poem to a rap freestyle.

Adam's work has garnered significant attention from scholars, critics, and readers alike. The New England Book Festival, the San Francisco Book Festival, and the Book of the Year Awards all honored The Anthology of Rap as one of the best anthologies of 2010. Both New York magazine and the Village Voice named it a Best Book of the Year. Three Days Before the Shooting. . . was named a Book to Watch For by Oprah's O Magazine, a Best Book of 2010 by The Root, and one of the year's best works of outsider fiction by NPR.

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, John Callahan. Adam earned his Ph. D. in English from Harvard University, studying with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Cornel West. He is professor of English at UCLA where he direct the Laboratory for Race & Popular Culture (RAP Lab).