Murray Forman is Professor of Media & Screen Studies at Northeastern University. Along with co-editing the previous editions of That's the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (2004, 2012), he is author of The 'Hood Comes First: Race, Space and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop (2002), and One Night on TV Is Worth Weeks at the Paramount: Popular Music on Early Television (2012). He was an inaugural recipient of the Nasir Jones Hip-Hop Fellowship at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University (2014-2015).

Mark Anthony Neal is the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor at Duke University. He is the founIding director of the Center for Arts, Digital Culture and Entrepreneurship (CADC) at Duke and co-directs the Duke Council on Race and Ethnicity. He is author of What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1999), Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002), Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities (2013), and New Black Man, Second Edition (2015). He is host of the video webcast Left of Black.

Regina N. Bradley is Associate Professor of English and African Diaspora Studies at Kennesaw State University. She is the author of Chronicling Stankonia: The Rise of the Hip Hop South (2021), editor of An OutKast Reader: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Postmodern South (2021), and a faculty editor for Southern Cultures journal. She was a recipient of the Nasir Jones Hip-Hop Fellowship at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University (2016), and can be reached at www.redclayscholar.com.