After three years of working on it, Travis Gosa (Cornell University) and I have published our first book, The Hip Hop & Obama Reader, on Oxford University Press.  This volume features original contributions from some of the country’s leading scholars and activists, who offer new perspectives on hip hop’s role in political mobilization, community organizing, and voter turnout during the Obama era and beyond.  They also consider the way Obama’s presidency has (or hasn’t) been shaped by hip hop and, conversely, how hip hop has responded to Obama.

So far, the feedback has been excellent, with Michael Eric Dyson calling the book “superb” and “brilliant” and Emmett Price describing it as “an unparagoned mixtape (in written form) of brilliance by an all-star cast of Hip Hop thought leaders, activists, and scholars.”