By Lucy Berbeo | Photography by Stephanie Yantz

Adam Bradley wouldn’t be a professor or a writer, he says, were it not for his grandmother.

In elementary school, Bradley was very nearly held back when a teacher thought he wasn’t learning to read quickly enough. “They told my family, ‘Adam is the sweetest boy in class, but he’s just not that bright,’” he says.

His grandmother, a beloved high school English teacher, quit her job to educate him at home. She taught him to read in a matter of weeks — and nurtured his budding creative voice. “Some of the first words I ever wrote were poetry,” he says. “She’d put a pad and pencil in my hand and tell me to go out in the yard and describe whatever my senses could find, whether that was the smell from her rose garden or the sight of an airplane cutting a contrail against the sky.”

Today a Harvard-educated literary critic, bestselling author and professor of English and African American studies at UCLA, Bradley built his career as an authority on the 20th-century novelist Ralph Ellison while also exploring song lyric in popular music as an innovative and influential literary form, particularly within hip hop. His works “Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop” and “The Poetry of Pop” have been instrumental in this growing area of scholarly inquiry.

“Song lyric is a vital space for contemporary poetry,” he says. “And hip hop offers us a means to engage with challenging issues — racism and classism, misogyny and homophobia, social justice and the promise of a multiracial American democracy — in a way where we’re all bobbing our heads to the same beat.”

Bradley explores this crucial space in the UCLA Laboratory for Race and Popular Culture, or RAP Lab, which he founded and directs. An interdisciplinary hub that invites scholars, students and community partners to spark critical conversations about society and politics, the lab is a key player in the UCLA Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies’ campuswide Hip Hop Initiative, which aims to establish UCLA as a center of gravity for hip-hop studies on the West Coast.

“It’s exciting to work with colleagues here to envision what a hip-hop future could be, and to start building it right now,” he says. “It’s an opportunity I couldn’t find on any other campus.”

In all his work — at UCLA, as an arts and culture writer-at-large for The New York Times’ T Magazine, and beyond — Bradley remains guided by the example set by his grandmother years ago.

“There’s a continuity of practice on my part, and a dedication to craft, whether I’m publishing a profile on Anderson .Paak or writing about Toni Morrison,” he says. “My entry point into this work is as a writer, first and foremost.”