Alexander Williams received his Master's in Literature from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 2021 and his Bachelor’s in Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2015. Alexander’s pedagogy and writing strengthens his assertion that life is art. Creatively, he explores this assertion through haunted poetry and the archetype of the Black male rapper. Because the persona created by the Black male rapper in the United States is a social experiment, Alexander’s work becomes the ultimate case study for his scholarly pursuits as poet, persona, and critic. Besides creative and poetic projects, Alexander co-founded the educational collective Lyripeutics, comprised of fellow RAP Lab members Shawn O’Neal, Kalonji Nzinga, Marlene Palomar, Karia White, and others. Through critical discussions and artistic pursuits, he believes emotional intelligence, mindfulness, meditation, and other practices can allow students to unpack the trauma that plagues their lives and establish their own personas to push American literary, cultural, and artistic boundaries.
His Master's thesis, "I AM JUST A RAPPER: A Lyrical and Cultural Analysis of Childish Gambino's Rise from Outcast to King," argues that by fulfilling his lyrical prophecies, Childish Gambino becomes Plato’s philosopher king: a leader proving his claim to the throne through his weaponization of intelligence, philosophy, and guardianship. To conduct this analysis, his thesis first presents a summary of the Black male rapper archetype to give the proper historical, critical, and cultural contexts in which Gambino’s work can usefully be analyzed. Second, it connects Alexander's research to prior scholarship on African American studies, hauntology, Romanticism, Black Marxism, and trauma theory. The last piece of Alexander's methodology is using Gambino’s lyrics as poetic support to illustrate how his ascension to philosopher king is a transcendent contemporary moment of resistance against the resurgence of white nationalism under the banner of Trumpism and a triumphant model of Black reclamation in the age of Black Lives Matter and police militarization.
Currently, Alexander is a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Los Angeles where he studies under Professor Adam Bradley and assists him with creating a RAP Lab at UCLA.
You can read Alexander's Master's thesis here: