Michael Eric Dyson is a renowned scholar, ordained Baptist minister, and public intellectual born in Detroit, Michigan. His innovative scholarship, combining cultural criticism and biography, focuses on race, religion, popular culture, and contemporary issues in the African American community. Dyson’s most recent book is April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Death and How It Changed America (2008).
He is also the author of Know What I Mean? (2007), a critical study of hip hop music, Debating Race (2007), a compilation of previously unpublished conversations with scholars, politicians and public commentators, Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster (2006), Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost its Mind (2006), Why I Love Black Women (2004), The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (2004), Open Mike (2002), I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr. (2001), and Race Rules: Navigating the Color Line (1997). “Effortlessly and with conviction, [Dyson] weaves together a range of themes from gangsta rap to graduate seminars, deepening them with highly varied and vividly portrayed personal experience,” Noam Chomsky has said of Dyson. A two-time winner of the NAACP Image Award, Dyson has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, DePaul University, Chicago Theological Seminary, The University of North Carolina, and Columbia and Brown Universities. He is currently University Professor at Georgetown University.