Baz Dreisinger is an Associate Professor in the English Department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, and the founder and Academic Director of the Prison-to-College Pipeline program (P2CP), which offers credit-bearing college courses and reentry planning to incarcerated men. She is also a reporter on popular culture, the Caribbean, world music, and race-related issues for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, and NPR, among others, and a co-producer and co-writer of the documentaries Black & Blue: Legends of the Hip-Hop Cop and Rhyme & Punishment. She is the author of Near Black: White to Black Passing in American Culture (2008).