We are pleased to announce that the 2025 Martha Jean Lemon Distinguished Speaker will be Adam Bradley. Mr. Bradley will visit the OCU campus on Tuesday, Sept. 23. A student event will be held at 1 p.m. and a public talk will take place at 7 p.m. in the Petree Recital Hall.
Adam Bradley is a bestselling author, a professor of English and African American Studies at UCLA, and founding director of the Laboratory for Race & Popular Culture (aka, the RAP Lab). Adam pioneered the study of rap lyrics as poetry and has worked with some of the leading artists in popular music. As a curator, he has collaborated with museums across the country and the globe to launch exhibitions of art and culture. Most recently, he co-curated “Hip Hop America: The Mixtape Exhibit” (2023-2025) at the GRAMMY Museum. As a writer at large for the New York Times’s T Magazine, Adam tells impactful stories in long-form essays. He is the author of six books, including Book of Rhymes, The Anthology of Rap, and the national bestseller One Day It’ll All Make Sense, a memoir he wrote with the rapper and actor Common. Adam lives in Los Angeles.
Visit Mr. Bradley’s website to learn more about his work.
The 2025 Martha Jean Lemon Distinguished Speaker event is supported by the Jeanne Hoffman Smith Center for Film & Literature and Richard and Gayle Parry.
The Martha Jean Lemon Distinguished Speaker Series features annual events that enrich the academic environment for the University and the surrounding community. Programs may relate to the arts and sciences, business, dance and entertainment, law, music, nursing, theater or religious topics.
The lecture series is supported through an endowment gift from Lynette Lemon Wert and Larry H. Lemon in 2010 on behalf of the Lemon family of Oklahoma City, in honor of Martha Jean Lemon, who graduated from OCU in 1968 with a degree in history and worked as an independent comparative religion scholar.
This series continues OCU’S tradition of the Distinguished Speakers Series which has included speakers such as David Brooks, Marian Wright Edelman, Henry Louis Gates, Jane Goodall, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Jonathan Kozol, Rabbi Harold Kushner, N. Scott Momaday, Bill Moyers, Sister Helen Prejean, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Andrew Weil, Fabian Cousteau, Reza Aslan, David Grann, Matthew Desmond, and Dina Gilio-Whitaker as well as Nobel Laureates Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Elie Wiesel, Wangari Maathai and Jody Williams.
