Exploring identity, education, and social change through poetry, pedagogy, and prose.

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Fresh writing on Education, Hip-Hop, Poetry, Politics, and Parenting—built to spark dialogue and move us toward social change. 

Move the Class is Doctor K’s vision of an educational approach grounded in hip-hop culture, politics, and pedagogy. Dr. Kahlil Almustafa brings 20+ years of using hip-hop and spoken word to enliven classrooms and community spaces. On Substack, you’ll find writing and resources designed to provoke critical thinking, deepen community, and support real-world learning. 

Educator and Spoken Word Poet Dr. Kahlil Almustafa Gasper (Doctor K) offers an autoethnographic account of developing a liberatory hip-hop pedagogy through more than a decade of work as a teaching artist in urban public schools. 

Drawing on ethnographic materials from five classroom residencies, Gasper narrates the lived realities of arts education on the margins, where creative practice, cultural work, and critical pedagogy converge amid persistent emotional and financial pressures.

Organized as a journey of pedagogical formation, “Move the Class,” which details classroom practices that use hip-hop as a pedagogical tool and spoken word as an embodied form of critical pedagogy. 

Blending narrative inquiry with educational theory, Doctor K contributes to scholarship on teaching artists and arts education while offering a practical and visionary framework for spoken word and hip-hop as tools for liberatory learning. 

The work will interest readers in hip-hop education, critical pedagogy, culturally-sustaining teaching, teacher education, and arts-based research methods.

Citizens of Hip-Hop, Hi(story) will no longer be told by the so-called hi(story)-tellersbut at open mics, on mixtapesand in corner-freestyle-sessionsaround the world.In this collection, award-winning spoken word artist, kahlil almustafa captures the evolutionary experiences, boldness, politics, dysfunction, contradictions and healing that have defined the hip-hop generation. 

Known as Hip-Hop’s Poet Laureate,“almustafa is unafraid to tackle thorny issues of race, gender, class, love, hate, with a keen eye and a precision worthy of a doctor, a healer, a root worker,” says author Kevin Powell. almustafa’s debut collection has been used in more than 40 classrooms throughout the United States.

“Growing Up Hip-Hop should be required reading for every junior high school & high school English class. Electric, relevant and engaging, almustafa’s poems voice the angst and hope of his generation,” educator and author, Dr. Bree Picower. This debut collection chronicles the growth of one young man through 15 years of poetry, leaving the reader with inspiration for action and a formula for change.

In From Auction Block to Oval Office, award-winning poet kahlil almustafa presents a collection of 100 poems written during the first 100 days of Barack Obama’s presidency. These poems explore the hopes, fears, contradictions and complexity which come with the election of the United States’ first African-American president. 

As President Obama confronted political and cultural problems hundreds of years in the making, almustafa took on the poetic challenge of writing one hundred poems. Written in the voice of a young, African-American male, a romantic revolutionary and an intellectual, these poems capture a nation teetering between danger and opportunity, cynicism and hope. 

From Auction Block to Oval Office is not a collection of pro- Obama poems or anti-Obama poems. These poems are meditations and mantras, punch-lines and prayers, adding a vital alternative to the coarse, polarized tone of the current political discourse. 

Most importantly, From Auction Block to Oval Office poses the questions: What if all Americans wrote a letter to the president? What is we all stopped to reflect and write 100 poems?