Adam Bradley teaches literature at the University of Colorado, Boulder. An expert scholar on both hip-hop poetics and the writer Ralph Ellison, he is the coeditor of the Yale Anthology of Rap (2010) and of Ellison’s posthumously published (and unfinished) novel Three Days Before the Shooting . . . (2010). This essay comes from Book of Rhymes (2009), an in-depth analysis of rap as poetry.

Reading the Genre

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