Meet Kevin Allred: a writer, speaker, educator, and (sometimes) musician with a passion for the politics of pop culture (and particular love of Beyoncé). An unapologetic outlaw of academia, he believes knowledge should be accessible to everyone—not just gatekeepers of the Ivory Tower—and that education should always also be fun.
Kevin's mission is to facilitate conversations that highlight the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class through pop culture analysis and storytelling; conversations that expose, question, and disrupt America's racist and heterosexist status quo and confront participants' various complicities in those systems. He aims especially to create conversations across difference while demanding white people, like himself, do better and work harder to create a better world. And he draws on his own experiences growing up queer in small-town, conservative Utah to do so.
In 2010, he created the popular "Politicizing Beyoncé" curriculum, and has taught the course as a full semester offering at universities and traveled the world for speaking engagements/workshops based on the curriculum. Kevin's writing has also been featured at NBC News, INTO, Salon, Quartz, Huffington Post, The Feminist Wire, Washington Post, The Establishment, among other outlets. He has appeared on CNN, HuffPost Live, and was a regular featured contributor on MSNBC's "So POPular with Janet Mock." His first book, Ain't I A Diva?: Beyoncé and the Power of Pop Culture Pedagogy, was published by the Feminist Press at CUNY in 2019.
Kevin currently resides in Brooklyn, NY with his boyfriend and a (possibly demonic) senior chihuahua.