Bakari Kitwana is an internationally known cultural critic, journalist, activist, and thought leader in the areas of hip-hop and Black youth political engagement. The Executive Director of Rap Sessions: Community Dialogues on Hip-Hop, which for the last seventeen years has conducted over 150 townhall meetings around the nation on difficult dialogues facing the millennial generation, Kitwana has been the Editor-in-Chief of The Source magazine, the Editorial Director of Third World Press, and co-founder of the 2004 National Hip-Hop Political Convention. In 2020, during the height of Covid-19 Pandemic, he cofounder of the Hip-Hop Political Education Summit, which convened two major virtual gatherings—The Hip-Hop Political Education Summit on Voter Suppression (Sept 2020) and The Hip-Hop Political Education Summit on Black Men and the Vote (October 2020).

The author of the groundbreaking books The Hip-Hop Generation (2002) and Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop (2005), Kitwana is co-editor of Democracy Unchained: How to Rebuild Government For the People (The New Press, 2020) and the collaborating writer for pioneering hip-hop artist Rakim’s memoir Sweat The Technique: Revelations on Creativity From The Lyrical Genius (Amistad/HarperCollins, 2019). Bakari has been the 2019-2020 Nasir Jones HipHop Fellow at Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, Artist-in-Residence at the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago, Media Fellow at Harvard Law-based Jamestown Project, and a visiting scholar at both Kent State University and Columbia College of Chicago. Currently the Founding Editorial Director of BlackPittsburgh.com, Kitwana has contributed to numerous publications and anthologies, including the 2021 New York Times best-selling anthology 400 Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 (Edited by Ibram Kendi and Keisha Blain, One World/Random House, 2021).