Hip Hop and Black Feminist Creative – Critical Practices

Meet The Speaker

• Gwendolyn D. Pough

  Associate Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences, Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Dean’s Professor of the Humanities

  Syracuse University

  Gwendolyn D. Pough is Associate Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences, Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Dean’s Professor of the Humanities at Syracuse University. She is the author of Check It While I Wreck It: Black Womanhood, Hip-Hop Culture, and the Public Sphere as well as numerous essays and articles on black feminism, hip-hop, critical pedagogy and black public culture. She has co-edited several special journal issues and the critically acclaimed Home Girls Make Some Noise: A Hip-Hop Feminism Anthology and the forthcoming in 2026 Hip Hop and Queer Black Feminism. She is the current President of the Rhetoric Society of America. And she is Past Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. She writes romance fiction under the pen name Gwyneth Bolton. She has twelve novels and a novella published to date. She has won several awards for her novels.

• Regina N. Bradley

  Associate Professor of English and African Diaspora Studies

  Kennesaw State University

  Dr. Regina N. Bradley is an award-winning writer and researcher of the Black American South. She is an alumna Nasir Jones HipHop Fellow (Hutchins Center, Harvard University, Spring 2016), Associate Professor of English and African Diaspora Studies at Kennesaw State University, a faculty editor for Southern Cultures journal, and co-host of the critically acclaimed southern hip hop podcast Bottom of the Map with music journalist Christina Lee.

  A prominent public voice and leading scholar on contemporary southern Black life and hip hop culture, Dr. Bradley's work has been featured on a range of media outlets including Netflix’s hip hop docuseries Hip-Hop Evolution, Washington Post, NPR, and Atlanta Journal Constitution. In May, 2017, Dr. Bradley delivered a TEDx talk, "The Mountaintop Ain't Flat," about the significance of hip hop in bridging the American Black South to the present and future. 

  Dr. Bradley is also the author of the critically acclaimed book Chronicling Stankonia: the Rise of the Hip-Hop South.  Chronicling Stankonia explores how Atlanta, GA hip hop duo OutKast and hip hop influences the culture of the Black American South in the long shadow of the Civil Rights Movement. She is also the editor of An OutKast Reader, a collection of essays about OutKast, and co-editor of the third edition of That’s the Joint!: the Hip Hop Studies Reader with Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal.Dr. Bradley can be reached through her website, www.redclayscholar.com.

• Chris Atkins Jr.

  Ph.D. Student

  Texas Christian University

  Christopher Atkins Jr. is a Ph.D. student in Rhetoric and Composition at Texas Christian University, where he also earned his M.A. in English with a focus on cultural rhetorics. His research centers Black communicative practices and Hip Hop Nation Language, exploring rhetorical drift across diasporic and sacred-secular borders. His master's thesis, From Born Jamericans to Boogiemonsters, offered a multimodal rhetorical analysis of Caribbean and African American linguistic hybridity in 1990s Hip Hop. A second-generation Jamaican American and active contributor to Black digital archives, Atkins blends creative and scholarly approaches in both his research and teaching. As an Assistant Adjunct Professor at UT Arlington, he fosters inclusive, student-centered learning environments that emphasize multimodal communication, critical inquiry, and cultural awareness. His pedagogy bridges theory and practice, empowering students to explore language and identity within complex cultural contexts.