Today Tariq Trotter—better known as Black Thought—is the platinum-selling, three-time Grammy-winning co-founder of The Roots, and one of the most exhilaratingly skillful and profound rappers the culture has ever produced. But his story begins with a tragedy: as a child, Trotter burned down his family’s home. The years that followed are the story of a life snatched from the flames, forged in fire.

In The Upcycled Self: A Memoir on the Art of Becoming Who We Are, Trotter doesn’t just narrate a riveting and moving portrait of the artist as a young man but gives readers a courageous model of what it means to live an examined life. In vivid vignettes, he tells the dramatic stories of the four powerful relationships that shaped him—community, friends, art, and family—each a complex weave of love, discovery, trauma, and loss.

But beyond offering the compellingly poetic account of one artist’s creative and emotional origins, Trotter explores the vital questions we all must confront about our formative years: How can we see the story of our young lives clearly? How do we use that story to understand who we’ve become? How do we forgive the people who loved and hurt us? How do we rediscover and honor our first dreams? And finally, what do we take forward, what do we pass on, what do we leave behind? This is the beautifully bluesy story of a boy genius’s coming of age that illuminates the redemptive power of the upcycle.

Trotter is one of the most powerful voices in hip-hop and the winner of three NAACP Image Awards and leads the house band on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, joined by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson (FAN ’21), co-founder of The Roots.

Trotter will be in conversation with Theaster Gates, world-renowned artist, archivist, social innovator, and professor and Special Advisor to the President at the University of Chicago. Prof. Gates creates work that focuses on space theory and land development, sculpture, and performance.