Being Dope: Hip Hop and Theory Through Mixtape Memoir

A.D. Carson is from Decatur, Illinois. His i used to love to dream (2020) was the first-ever rap album peer-reviewed for publication with an academic press. It received the 2021 Research Award for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities from the University of Virginia, was a Category Winner (Best eProduct) of a Prose Award from the Association of American Publishers in 2021, and a Finalist for the American Council of Learned Societies Open Access Book Prize and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Award. Carson’s dissertation album, Owning My Masters, received the Clemson Graduate Government’s Outstanding Dissertation Award in 2017, and was published in 2024.