Carl BernardCarl Bernard is of Haitian decent, orientated with African roots, living in America. He is a college student at Kingsborough Community College. His goal is to break barriers of division through poetry and teaching fitness. He lives to remind humanity that we are all the same, even with slight differences.
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Toni Blackman |
Toni Blackman is an international champion of hip-hop culture, known for the irresistible, contagious energy of her performances and for her alluring female presence. She’s all heart, all rhythm, all song, all power, a one-woman revolution of poetry and microphone. An award-winning artist, her steadfast work and commitment to hip-hop led the U.S. Department of State to select her to work as the first ever hip-hop artist to work as an American Cultural Specialist. She has already served in Senegal, Ghana, Botswana, and Swaziland where her residencies include performance, workshops, and lectures on hip hop music and culture. She recently toured Southeast Asia with Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Musical Ambassador program and has shared the stage with the likes of Erykah Badu, Mos Def, The Roots, Wu Tang Clan, GURU, Bahamadia, Boot Camp Clic, Me’Shell NdegeoCello, Sarah McLachlan, Sheryl Crow, Jill Sobule and even Rickie Lee Jones. Her first book, Inner-Course was released in 2003 (Villard/Random
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House). Toni has performed in Eve Ensler’s V-Day Festival, the DODGE Poetry Festival, in Spain at the Barcelona World Social Forum, featured in the CUTTING EDGE Festival in Darmstadt, Germany, featured at SENERAP International Hip Hop Festival in Dakar and toured South Africa as a headliner on the URBAN VOICES Festival alongside the legendary Linton Kwesi Johnson.
Toni is a member of the Spoken Word Committee of the New York Chapter of the Recording Academy (a.k.a. The Grammy’s). Also, AOL BlackVoices named Toni as one of the top ten African-American Next Generation Leaders to watch. She recently hosted an episode of Sunshine Airlines for Austrian National Television-which celebrated 30 years of hip-hop and the contributions of Chuck D.
This multi-talented woman has been listed in ESSENCE Magazine’s listing of “30 Women to Watch,” participated in the 2006 ESSENCE Music Festival, featured in SAVOY Magazine, BOOK Magazine, Newsweek Japan, The Washington Post, and in The New York Times. NHK-Global Japan Television produced a full-length documentary on her work with hip-hop airing it to 11 million viewers on national TV in Japan. She and her work have been highlighted several times on BET, as well as on FOX News and VH1, featured in UPSCALE, VIBE, HONEY, appeared in Tokion magazine and appears in numerous award-winning documentaries including Furious Force of Rhymes, Beyond Beats and Rhymes, and Freestyle. Third World Newsreel and J.T. Takagi produced a documentary short “She Rhymes Like A Girl” exploring Toni’s work.
Toni is a member of the Spoken Word Committee of the New York Chapter of the Recording Academy (a.k.a. The Grammy’s). Also, AOL BlackVoices named Toni as one of the top ten African-American Next Generation Leaders to watch. She recently hosted an episode of Sunshine Airlines for Austrian National Television-which celebrated 30 years of hip-hop and the contributions of Chuck D.
This multi-talented woman has been listed in ESSENCE Magazine’s listing of “30 Women to Watch,” participated in the 2006 ESSENCE Music Festival, featured in SAVOY Magazine, BOOK Magazine, Newsweek Japan, The Washington Post, and in The New York Times. NHK-Global Japan Television produced a full-length documentary on her work with hip-hop airing it to 11 million viewers on national TV in Japan. She and her work have been highlighted several times on BET, as well as on FOX News and VH1, featured in UPSCALE, VIBE, HONEY, appeared in Tokion magazine and appears in numerous award-winning documentaries including Furious Force of Rhymes, Beyond Beats and Rhymes, and Freestyle. Third World Newsreel and J.T. Takagi produced a documentary short “She Rhymes Like A Girl” exploring Toni’s work.
Mahogany BrowneThe Cave Canem, Poets House & Serenbe Focus alum, is the author of several books including Redbone (nominated for NAACP Outstanding Literary Works), Dear Twitter: Love Letters Hashed Out On-line, recommended by Small Press Distribution & About.com Best Poetry Books of 2010, Mahogany bridges the gap between lyrical poets and literary emcee. Browne has toured Germany, Amsterdam, England, Canada and recently Australia as 1/3 of the cultural arts exchange project Global Poetics. Her journalism work has been published in magazines Uptown, KING, XXL, The Source, Canada's The Word and UK's MOBO. Her poetry has been published in literary journals Pluck, Manhattanville Review, Muzzle, Union Station Mag, Literary Bohemian, Bestiary, Joint & The Feminist Wire. She is the co-editor of forthcoming anthology The Break Beat Poets: Black Girl Magic and and chapbook collection Kissing Caskets (Yes Yes Books). She is an Urban Word NYC Artistic Director (as seen on HBO’s Brave New Voices), founder of Women Writers of Color Reading Room, Director of BLM@Pratt Programming and facilitates performance poetry and writing workshops throughout the country. Browne is also the publisher of Penmanship Books, the Nuyorican Poets Café Poetry Program Director and Friday Night Slam curator and recent graduate from Pratt Institute MFA Writing & Activism program.
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Dr. Todd Craig |
As a product of Ravenswood and Queensbridge Houses in Queens, New York, Dr. Todd Craig is a writer, educator and DJ whose career goal involves meshing his love of writing, teaching and music. Craig straddles the genres of fiction, creative non-fiction, and poetry, with texts that paint a vivid depiction of the urban lifestyle he experienced in his community, and listened to in hip-hop music. However, his formal academic training allows him to express the hope and infinite possibilities people of color have in their daily lives. Craig completed his doctorate in English at St. John’s University where he was selected as the Hooding Ceremony Student Keynote Speaker and awarded the Academy of American Poets Prize. Craig’s research interests include composition/ rhetoric, hip-hop pedagogy, African-American literature, multimodality in the Composition classroom and creative writing pedagogy and poetics. His research explores the hip-hop DJ as 21st century new media reader and writer. With interviews from ninety notable DJs in the hip-hop/music community, “K for the Way": DJ Literacy and Rhetoric for Comp 2.0 and Beyond examines the function of DJ Rhetoric and Literacy, and it’s potential contributions to Composition classrooms. His most recent publications include poems in The Portable Boog Reader 6: NYC, “…spy verse spy…” which appears in Staten Island Noir (Akashic Books) and scholarly journal articles in Fiction International, Radical Teacher, The Killens Review of Arts and Letters, Modern Language Studies and Changing English. Presently, Dr. Craig is an Associate Professor of English at Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York where he also serves as Composition Coordinator.
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E the EMCEEE the EMCEE will represent Science Genius B.A.T.T.L.E.S. at the Hiphop Literaces 2017 conference.
Science Genius B.A.T.T.L.E.S. is an initiative that is focused on utilizing the power of hip-hop music and culture to introduce youth to the wonder and beauty of science. The core message of the initiative is to meet urban youth who are traditionally disengaged in science classrooms on their cultural turf, and provide them with the opportunity to express the same passion they have for hip-hop culture for science. Concurrently, the project aims to display the interests of science enthusiasts who have a passion for hip-hop, and introduce both hip-hop and science to a wider audience. Together, Chris Emdin and Rap Genius sponsor Science Genius. For more information, click here. |
Dr. Chris EmdinDr. Chris Emdin is an associate professor in the Department of Mathematics, Science, and Technology at Teachers College, Columbia University, where he also serves as Associate Director of the Institute for Urban and Minority Education. The creator of the #HipHopEd social media movement and Science Genius B.A.T.T.L.E.S., author of the award-winning book Urban Science Education for the Hip-Hop Generation and the New York Times Best Seller, For White Folks Who Teach In The Hood and the Rest of Ya’ll Too. Emdin was named the 2015 Multicultural Educator of the Year by the National Association of Multicultural Educators and has been honored as a STEM Access Champion of Change by the White House under President Obama. In addition to teaching, he served as a Minorities in Energy Ambassador for the US Department of Energy.
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DJ Lynneé Denise |
For the past decade, DJ Lynneé Denise has worked as an artist who incorporates self-directed project based research into interactive workshops, music events and public lectures that offer participants the opportunity to develop an intimate relationship with under-explored topics related to the cultural history of marginalized communities. She creates multi dimensional and multi sensory experiences that require audiences to apply critical thinking to how the arts can hold viable solutions to social inequality. Her work is informed and inspired by underground cultural movements, the 1980s, migration studies, theories of escape, and electronic music of the African Diaspora. She's the product of the Historically Black Fisk University with a MA from the historically radical San Francisco State University Ethnic Studies department. With support from the Jerome Foundation Travel Grant, The Astrae Lesbian Foundation for Justice, Idea Capital, Residency BiljmAIR (Netherlands) and The Rauschenberg Artists as Activists Grant, she has been able to resource her performative research on a local, national and global level. Beyond the dance floor, her work provides "Entertainment with a Thesis." DJ Lynnée Denise is a lecturer at California State University’s Pan African Studies Department and the Chicano Studies Department.
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Dr. Treva Lindsey |
Dr. Treva Lindsey is an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University. Her research and teaching interests include African American women’s history, black popular and expressive culture, black feminism(s), hip hop studies, critical race and gender theory, and sexual politics. Her first book is Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington D.C. She has published in The Journal of Pan-African Studies, Souls, African and Black Diaspora, the Journal of African American Studies, African American Review, The Journal of African American History, Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, Urban Education, The Black Scholar, Feminist Studies, Signs, and the edited collection, Escape from New York: The New Negro Renaissance Beyond Harlem. She is the inaugural Equity for Women and Girls of Color Fellow at Harvard University (2016-2017). During this fellowship, she is working on a book project tentatively titled, Hear Our Screams: Black Women, Violence, and The Struggle for Justice. She is also the recipient of several awards and fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Emory University, the National Women’s Studies Association, the Coca Cola Critical Difference for Women Grant, the Center for Arts and Humanities at the University of Missouri and the College of Arts and Sciences at The Ohio State University. Dr.
Lindsey was the inaugural recipient of the University of Missouri Faculty Achievement in Diversity Award. She is the co-editor of a forthcoming collection on the future of Black Popular Culture Studies (NYU Press). She is building a strong online presence by guest contributing to traditional and digital forums such as Al Jazeera, BET, Complex Magazine, Cosmopolitan, HuffPost Live, and The Marc Steiner Show. |
Angelo NashAngelo Nash was born and raised in Queens, NY. He attended Andrew Jackson High School and was an A+ student, but started moving away from school into the streets when he was 14. He has been involved in hip-hop all of his life---- one of my closest friends growing up was LL Cool J. When asked by him to join the movement, he didn’t because he didn’t see the future. Just like his associates who started FUBU, he eventually began making wrong decisions and lived a life of criminal activity which led to the last 30 years of incarceration. This, in turn. has brought him to the arms of College Initiative at John Jay College.
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Dr. Emery Petchauer |
Dr. Emery Petchauer is Associate Professor of English and Teacher Education at Michigan State University where he also coordinates the English Education program. His research has focused on the aesthetic practices of urban arts, particularly hip-hop culture, and their connections to teaching, learning, and living. He is the author of Hip-Hop Culture in College Students’ Lives (Routledge, 2012), the first scholarly study of hip-hop culture on college campuses, and the co-editor of Schooling Hip-Hop: Expanding Hip-Hop Based Education Across the Curriculum (Teachers College Press, 2013). Nearly two decades of organizing and sustaining urban arts spaces across the United States inform this scholarly work. Dr. Petchauer also studies high-stakes teacher licensure exams and their relationship to the racial diversity of the teaching profession.
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Theories of social psychology and spatial studies inform this work, as do many years of working individually with preservice teachers to pass these exams. Dr. Petchauer has received teaching awards at both the high school and college levels, including the Board of Trustees Distinguished Teaching Award at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the nation’s first Historically Black University.
Carlos QuintanaCarlos Quintana joined the Prisoner Reentry Institute in January 2016 as the College Initiative Program Coordinator. Previously, he worked for nine years in after-school programs in New York City public schools doing Human Rights and Social Justice programming. Carlos holds a BA in Sociology and Education from Northeastern University where he studied to become an elementary school teacher. Carlos is passionate about Social Justice issues and cares deeply about higher education access for under-served communities.
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Dr. Elaine Richardson |
Cleveland, Ohio native, Dr. Elaine Richardson is currently Professor of Literacy Studies at The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, where she teaches in the Department of Teaching and Learning. Her research interests include the liberation and critical literacy education of people of the Black African Diaspora. Her books include African American Literacies, (2003, Routledge), focusing on teaching writing from the point of view of African American Language and Literacy traditions; Hiphop Literacies (2006 Routledge) is a study of Hiphop language use as an extension of Black folk traditions. Her urban education memoir, PHD (Po H# on Dope) to PhD: How Education Saved My Life, (2013, New City Community Press) chronicles her life from drugs and the streetlife to the award-winning scholar and university professor, art activist: Richardson has also co-edited two volumes on African American rhetorical theory, Understanding African American Rhetoric: Classical Origins to Contemporary Innovations (2003, Routledge) and African American Rhetoric(s): Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2004, Southern Illinois University Press), and one volume on Hiphop Feminism--Home Girls Make Some Noise (2007, Parker Publishing). Among her many awards, in 2004, she was Fulbright lecturing/researcher in the department of Literatures in English at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica; Who’s Who Black Columbus 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016; National Council of Negro Women, Community Service Award, 2012; Outstanding Woman of Columbus, 2011; Cleveland State University Distinguished Alumni, 2007, and more. Richardson’s professional memberships include the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), The Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), Rhetoric Society of America, as well as Committee of Linguists of African Descent (CLAD).
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She is Director of The Ohio State University Hiphop Literacies Conference, as well as the nascent non-profit Education Foundation for Freedom, focusing on educational empowerment of women and girls. Richardson, aka Dr. E is also a recording artist and performer, using her performance to reach souls on a deeper level. Of her urban education memoir, PHD to Ph.D.: How Education Saved My Life, Professor Ted Lardner writes: “If Zora Neale Hurston had a god-daughter, she could be Elaine Richardson: on so many paths, she comes to these pages a deep student of life--the one who studies it up close, unguarded, and, with a musician's ear for the song that lives in all of her experience, brings home its truths in their fearsome and freeing power. This book, like the life it describes, is a work of spirit Richardson records for us, another way to talk to, and talk about, God.” Her forthcoming book is tentatively titled “Our Hiphop Feminist Literacies Matter: Reading the World with Black Girls.”
Katherine SchafferKatie Schaffer first joined the Prisoner Reentry Institute in November 2014 as a Curriculum Developer and Instructor for the College Readiness Course at Queensboro Correctional Facility. In January 2016, she joined the full-time staff of PRI as the Program Coordinator for the Prison-to-College Pipeline. In this capacity, she oversees PRI’s in-prison college access work. She also teaches a biweekly College Strategies class and creates institutional and interpersonal supports for students as they transition from college in prison to college in the community. She comes to this work through CUNY Start, a transitional program that provides academic support to students who wish to attend CUNY community colleges. She also shows up as an activist and organizer. Katie is a board member of the Third Wave Fund, an organization which supports and builds capacity for groups fighting for gender justice, and a member of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice working with Communities United for Police Reform. In addition to her work with PRI, Katie writes and runs workshops for educators and families about gender and sexuality in early childhood at the New York Early Childhood Professional Development Institute.
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Devon SimmonsDevon Simmons is a Harlem native who currently resides in the Bronx. He made his way to John Jay in 2012 by way of the prison-to-college pipeline. In his freshmen year at Otisville Correctional Facility, his work was selected for John Jay’s Finest. After his release serving 15 1⁄2 years. he immediately enrolled in Hostos community college where he graduated with Honors, becoming the first from the program. He also is a part-time student at Columbia University's Justice-in-Education Scholars program. As a Criminal Justice major and English minor, his goal is to change the narrative of those formerly incarcerated and promote the importance of education. |
Leo Yankton from the Lakota Nation |
Leo Yankton was born in Compton, California and moved to Pine Ridge Indian Reservation between the ages of 6 and 7 years old. At 15 years old, he moved to Lincoln, Nebraska and has travelled around the country throughout the rest of his life. He is an Oglala Lakota Native man who's had long hair most of his life and has always lived his native culture and religion. He is a community leader and activist fighting for Native American Indigenous issues of suppression and abuse of his people. He is a radio host for "Intertribal Beats" 89.3 KZUM/kzum.org, a radio show that plays all Native artists and deals with Native issues and news. He has been actively involved in the Standing Rock movement to stop a billion dollar oil corporation and the United States government from putting an oil-contaminating pipeline under our river that supplies 18 million people with life-giving water. He uses music to help spread the message of activism to the people who are listeners. He spreads awareness about Native artists and the suppression of talented artists, as well as the natural history of America that has been written in the blood of Native peoples.
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Most people don't even realize America has the most horrific genocide in history, killing off between 50 to 100 million Natives, stealing 95% of Native lands and ways of life, and using propaganda and false history like the stories of Christopher Columbus and Pocahontas to cover up the true history of the establishment of the United States of America.