Portrait of Dr. Regina Bradley looking away from the camera in a pink and brown dress.
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, 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 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. Chronicling Stankonia was named one of the “Books All Georgians Should Read” in 2022. She is also the editor of An OutKast Reader, a collection of essays about OutKast, and a co-editor alongside Mark Anthony Neal and Murray Forman of the third edition of That’s the Joint! The Hip Hop Studies Reader.
As a complement to her scholarship, Dr. Bradley is also an acclaimed fiction writer. Her first short story collection, Boondock Kollage: Stories from the Hip Hop South, was published by Peter Lang press in 2017. Jesmyn Ward described the stories in Boondock Kollage as leaving her “breathless and incoherent.” Dr. Bradley’s short story “Beautiful Ones” was a 2017 Pushcart Prize nominee in short fiction. Her other stories have been featured in Obsidian, Transition, and Oxford American. Dr. Bradley’s fiction has been supported by the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop and the Tin House Summer Workshop. She is currently working on her first novel, Reluctant Ancestors, about the disappearance of a teenaged black boy in Southwest Georgia.
Dr. Bradley can be reached via Twitter @redclayscholar or through her website, www.redclayscholar.com.