By Janet Singleton

Adam Bradley was in early elementary school in Northern California when, at a parent-teacher conference, his teacher informed his mother that he was dumb. “She said, ‘Adam is the sweetest boy in the room, but he’s not that bright,’” Bradley recalls. She said that he couldn’t read and he would be held back a grade. So his mother pulled him out of school, and the family moved to Utah, where his grandmother quit work to home school him. “Within weeks, I was reading everything from cereal boxes to books. When I tested usually I was three or four or five grades ahead.” In defiance of his former teacher’s another-one-bites-the-dust mandate, Bradley went on to earn a PhD in English from Harvard.

This year, the 35-year-old University of Colorado-Boulder English professor is having a markedly prolific season in seeing projects of his once-maligned mind come to fruition. He recently co-edited Ralph Ellison’s Three Days Before the Shooting: . . . The Unfinished Second Novel (Yale Press). Bradley’s Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop (Basic Civitas) comes out this month. His critical exploration of a groundbreaking writer’s fiction, Ralph Ellison in Progress (Yale), hits the streets in May. Yale Anthology of Rap, which he co-edited with Andrew DuBois, premieres in the fall. It’s as if he never takes his hands off the keyboard.

Bradley’s commitment to studying black America’s cultural vernacular started with his undergraduate work at Lewis & Clark College, with Prof. John Callahan. A friend of Ellison and executor of his literary estate after the writer’s death in 1994, Callahan asked a 19-year-old Bradley to help him catalog Ellison’s work. It was no small job. Twenty-seven boxes of a second novel awaited completion. Struggling, stop-start writers with dust-gathering manuscripts may take heart that Ellison, renowned author, essayist, and literary critic, labored over his second book for decades, yet never finished it. Forty years passed between the publication of Invisible Man and his death. His second novel had grown to 1,200 pages, but had not grown up.

Bradley never met Ellison, who, at 80, would have been dying of pancreatic cancer at about the time Bradley was entering college. Yet he heard much about him through Callahan, who said Ellison had felt he was close to finishing his tome.

“Ellison was pained by his lack of completion,” Bradley says. “He said writing was both torture and joy.”

“We changed the way the book was structured,” Bradley says.Yet he and Callahan decided to release the work without excess footnotes, brackets, and explanations. “We let Ellison speak directly to the reader.”

Three Days Before the Shooting. . . garnered praise from Publisher’s Weekly: “With multiple versions and fragments from the massive work,” says the review, “this edition will have the greatest appeal to Ellison enthusiasts and scholars, as well as to readers interested in the punishing process of novelistic composition.”

As a whole, the work does not have a simple beginning, middle, and end, Bradley says. “It exists in suspended animation.”

Moving from Ellison to hip-hop came naturally, says Bradley, a non-traditionalist in an academic world where in the recent past, high-brow never met low-brow on the same levelface. And he admits the late author preferred swing jazz to contemporary music. “I don’t think he would have liked rap,” Bradley says.

Yet his immersion in the writer’s work helped Bradley better understand hip hop. “Ellison was a keen observer of the vernacular process—people taking something foisted upon them and making it their own.” This happens in rap, he says, through performers making songs out of random lyrics and beats.

Another lesson he learned from Ellison’s writing was about identity. “It can be willed,” Bradley says. As a person with a mixed racial heritage, it was important for him to know that he could choose a black identity.

The formula of Bradley’s early life resembles the childhood of President Barack Obama. Bradley, too, had a determined white mother and loving white grandparents; a mysterious black father; and an early education in black pride and history despite growing up in a majority culture community.

Bradley did not meet his father and become acquainted with the African-American side of his family until he was in his twenties. “I just knocked on his door one day and introduced myself.” It was uncomfortable at first, but they eventually developed a relationship, he says. Why did his dad choose not to be a part of his son’s childhood? “For reasons that only he would be able to tell you.”

He has followed the advice of a character in Invisible Man, he says, who implores the protagonist to “be your own father, young man.”

The combination of mentors and self-invention seems to have worked. Not only has Bradley cranked out stacks of publications to his credit in 2010 alone, his cultural commentary has been picked up by the New York Times, NPR, and C-SPAN. Not bad for a guy the teacher labeled not too bright.

Janet Singleton is an award-winning journalist and novelist.