Michael Eric Dyson is an American academic, author, Baptist minister, and radio host. He is a professor in the College of Arts and Science and in the Divinity School at Vanderbilt University. Described by Michael A. Fletcher as "a Princeton Ph.D. and a child of the streets who takes pains never to separate the two", Dyson has authored or edited more than twenty books dealing with subjects such as race, religion and politics, as well as biographies on Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Marvin Gaye, Barack Obama, Bill Cosby, Tupac Shakur and Jay-Z.