Robin D. G. Kelley is Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is the recipient of many awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and Freedom Scholar Award. His books include the prize-winning, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (Free Press, 2009); Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times (Harvard University Press, 2012); Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Beacon Press, 2002); Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (University of North Carolina Press, 1990, 2nd Ed. 2015); Race Rebels: Culture Politics and the Black Working Class (The Free Press, 1994); Yo’ Mama’s DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Beacon Press, 1997); and Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls, and the Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century, written collaboratively with Dana Frank and Howard Zinn (Beacon Press, 2001). He also edited Walter Rodney's, The Russian Revolution: A View From the Third World (with Jesse Benjamin) (New York: Verso, 2018); Black, Brown, and Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the African Diaspora (with Franklin Rosemont) (University of Texas Press, 2009); The Other Special Relationship: Race, Rights and Riots in Britain and the United States (with Stephen Tuck) (New York: Palgrave, 2015); To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans (with Earl Lewis) (Oxford University Press, 2000); and Imagining Home: Class, Culture, and Nationalism in the African Diaspora (with Sidney J. Lemelle) (Verso Books, 1995).

Kelley is currently completing two books, Making a Killing: Cops, Capitalism, and the War on Black Life and The Education of Ms. Grace Halsell: An Intimate History of the American Century (both forthcoming Metropolitan Books).

His essays have appeared in dozens of publications, including The Nation, New York Times, New Yorker, American Historical Review, American Quarterly, African Studies Review, Social Text, Metropolis, Journal of American History, New Labor Forum, and The Boston Review, for which he also serves as Contributing Editor.