Tell Your Individual Story So That We May Understand Our Collective Story
An Interview with Professor Adam Bradley
Adam Bradley is a Professor of English at UCLA, and he is the founding Director of the Laboratory for Race and Popular Culture (the RAP Lab). His research interests include African American Literature, Poetry & Poetics, Hip Hop Poetics, Song Lyrics, and Popular Culture.
Why do we write?
I write because I’m not much fun to be around when I don’t. It wasn’t always that way. When I was six years old, my mother met with my first-grade teacher for one of those regular parent-teacher conferences at the end of the year. She told my mother, “Adam is the sweetest boy. He’s just not that bright.” I hadn’t progressed in my reading and writing like the other children. The teacher thought I should be held back for another year in first grade.
My mother wasn’t having any of that. She pulled me out of school, took my younger brother and me back to her own childhood home, and entrusted my education in my grandmother — a gifted high school English and Art History teacher. My grandmother taught me to read within what seemed like a matter of weeks. Soon after that, she taught me to write. She’d give me a piece of paper and a pencil and instruct me to go out into the yard and describe…
