Dr. Adolph is an Assistant Professor of English at Georgia State University Perimeter College, where he teaches composition, literature, and cultural studies to students from diverse backgrounds and interests. With over 13 years of teaching experience, he has a Ph.D. in English and an MA in African-American Studies from the University of Missouri-Columbia. Adolph uses hip-hop, film, and literary criticism as pedagogical tools to engage and inspire students and to foster critical thinking and writing skills.

Dr. Adolph is also a hip-hop scholar and a fatherhood coach, with a passion and mission to empower fathers, especially African American dads, to heal from their trauma and change their fatherhood narratives. He is the founder and coach of DadCypher, a hip-hop guide to fatherhood, where he offers workshops, consultations, and content creation for dads who want to remix their dad stories. He has published op-eds and articles on Blavity, where he writes and speaks about his journey as a fatherless dad who found healing and identity through hip-hop.

Dr. Nickolaus A. Ortiz is an assistant professor of mathematics education at Georgia State University, and a 2022 recipient of the Ernest D. Morrell Emerging Scholar Award. His research focuses on how an ontological Blackness is manifested and/or stifled during high-quality mathematics instruction that emphasizes teaching for conceptual understanding, mathematics discourse, and cultural relevance. Specifically, he studies mathematics discourse and Black Language, and is actively theorizing about what it means to create a Black liberatory mathematics education that affirms these linguistic practices and Black people writ large. In 2024, he received the Early Career Publication award from the American Educational Research Association Special Interest Group in Research in Mathematics Education. He is also interested in identifying new and innovative ways for Black children to demonstrate mathematics proficiency. His scholarship deals with these issues, always centering the brilliance of Black children in mathematics as an irrefutable reality. He joined FADA leadership in the Fall of 2023.

Dr. Lakeyta Bonnette-Bailey is a Professor of Africana Studies at Georgia State University and the Co-Director for the Center for the Advancement of Students and Alumni (CASA). Her research interests include Hip Hop culture, popular culture, political behavior, political attitudes, African-American politics, Black women and Politics, political psychology and public opinion. Her current research examines the relationship between political rap music and racial attitudes in a book (with Adolphus Belk, Jr) tentatively titled, Check the Rhyme:  Political Rap Music and Racial Attitudes (New York University Press. She recently published a co-edited volume with Jonathan Gayles entitled Black Popular Culture and Social Justice:  Beyond the Culture (Routledge Press 2023).  Dr. Bonnette-Bailey has also published a co-edited volume with Adolphus Belk Jr entitled For the Culture:  Hip-Hop and Social Justice (University of Michigan Press, 2022).  Additionally, Dr. Bonnette-Bailey published (2015) a book with the University of Pennsylvania Press entitled, Pulse of the People:  Rap Music and Black Political Attitudes. In 2018, she was a Nasir Jones/ W. E. B. Du Bois Hip-Hop Fellow with the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.  In 2019, Dr. Bonnette-Bailey presented a TedX talk entitled “The Political Impact of Rap Music.”