Greg Tate has been a leading voice on contemporary Black music, art, literature, film, and politics since launching his career at the Village Voice in the early 1980s. Through his signature mix of vernacular poetics and cultural criticism, Tate elucidates how race, gender, and class shape popular culture and why visionary Black aesthetics, philosophies, and politics help define 21st-century America. He is also a musician, leading the conducted improvisation ensemble Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber. Tate lectures on the work of Kerry James Marshall.​