Khalilah Ali received her doctorate in Educational Studies with a focus on Literacy, Pedagogy, and Culture from Emory University, Masters in Middle and Secondary English Instruction and Bachelors in Literature and African American Studies from Georgia State University. She is also a member in the educational advocacy collective TITUS (Teaching in the Urban South). Dr. Ali is an Assistant Professor of Education at Spelman College.

Khalilah’s research also explores the construction of Black women’s racialized, sexualized and politicized artist-educator-activists’ identities expressed through hip-hop, spoken word, visual art and performative texts; the book also examines the ways in which places of production, i.e. bars, coffee shops, galleries, streets, & clubs, function as literary Third Spaces, wherein the artist-educator-activists’ identities and texts interact with these spaces’ unspoken-unsanctioned curricula as well the spect-actors that consume the texts. As is evinced by both her professional & cultural work, Dr. Ali realizes that education occurs both inside the and outside the classroom–she is indeed dedicated to embodying the truism that education happens anywhere there is willing learner. Her research agenda includes the publication of two books, A Bad Bitch’s Pedagogy and Born Into the Wiz: Knowledge as Hip Hop’s Fifth Element, as well as a hip hop project entitled Manifesto