Wearing a burnt-yellow raincoat, Roy Kinsey moves through the spikey afternoon rain into the Sweetgreen on Lincoln Avenue. The coat comfortably juxtaposes the monochromatic black outfit underneath, and the lights reflecting off his gold piercings are the only other pop of non-fluorescent brightness in the room. As he sets down his coat and matching yellow can of kombucha, I’m struck by his gentle, confident voice and his unflinching, inquisitive gaze.
I’m meeting Kinsey on his lunch break from the Chicago Public Library — an environment where the softness of his timbre and the sense of calm that paints his demeanor are essential. Conversely, his confidence and decisive word choice are necessities in his prolific career as a rapper, which now spans twelve albums. Kinsey aims to bring these two seemingly conflicting worlds together through the Rapbrary, a library dedicated to preserving rap and understanding the genre as a literary art form.
The Rapbrary began informally in his basement, which also serves as his music studio and personal library. In 2015, Kinsey began curating what would become the Rapbrary’s holdings, steadily collecting magazines like Source or XXL along with as many books written by hip-hop artists as he could find. As the stacks of pages in his rap archive grew, his vision for a physical library began to solidify.
“When I talk about preservation, I think a lot of times people look at Black culture and Black art as something that could be easily dismissed or stolen because of the ephemera that wasn’t created,” Kinsey said. “A lot of times we were prohibited or disrupted from writing the word, and so you get something like rap that has stemmed from oral storytelling … and we have to keep these stories safe.”
To test this process of preservation, Kinsey began hosting workshops, writing events, open mics and other programming at the public library. Some workshops seek to highlight the poetry of rap, dissecting lyrics as a means of honoring the authorship of these musicians. Others teach those in attendance how to express themselves through writing — a skill he has worked tirelessly to hone as a means of articulating his own identity.
As a queer man within the stereotypically homophobic culture that is hip-hop, Kinsey has taken inspiration from his musical heroes to create space for his experiences to be articulated. If artists like Lil Kim, Missy Elliott and Tupac could be unapologetic about their identities, why couldn’t he?
“That’s what rap has always meant to me. Not only can you, but you’re supposed to come into this space, speak your piece and say this is how I’m doing it in my life,” Kinsey said. “The only way that hip-hop can evolve is by us creating our own space and telling our truth here and being unapologetic about it.”
Preservation at the Rapbrary then began to extend beyond the work of rappers, as Kinsey set a clear intention to include other writers of color and queer storytellers. He feels that these works are policed similarly to rap music, comparing attempts to ban books by authors like Toni Morrison to the backlash faced by hip-hop groups like N.W.A.
“You can ban and challenge a Pulitzer Prize winner, and you can ban and challenge N.W.A., [but] I was just kind of seeing that thread that you’re trying to ban Black stories. You’re trying to challenge Black realities.”
A library’s ability to preserve culture and marginalized realities is a growing necessity. During National Library Week 2025, the American Library Association reported that 72% of demands to censor books in school and public libraries came from organized movements. Seven of the works they cited as the top ten most challenged books of 2024 were written by an author of color, a queer author, or explored LGBTQ+ themes.
Aymar Jean Christian, a collaborator of Kinsey’s and a professor of communication studies at Northwestern University, sees Kinsey’s commitment to the Rapbrary as an essential and singular mission within this social climate. “At a time when libraries and Black history are under attack, Roy’s work is so vital and important,” Christian said. “Rapbrary offers an exciting way to reimagine 21st-century literacy and community engagement, and I have all the faith that Roy has the tenacity to see it through.”
As tenacious as Kinsey may be in his pursuit to officially open a physical space for the Rapbrary, it has been a tumultuous process. The library had a temporary home in the West Side event space Ironweed, but Kinsey was asked to leave the location in January.
While they have yet to find a replacement, Kinsey’s belief in the project is steadfast. His creative vision manifests itself through other pursuits that support the Rapbrary’s mission, like the book club he is currently running in partnership with Nobody’s Darling, a Black-woman-owned queer bar in Andersonville. Other endeavors include a poetry collection titled Dandelions: A Legacy Project, released in April, and a children’s book titled DiAngelo and the Dandelion — which he hopes to release in September.
These projects are Kinsey’s effort to provide his own contributions to the ephemera of hip-hop culture, but the album Dandelions: Gods Don’t Cry is his artistic centerpiece. The album was released on streaming services on April 30, and awaits a formal vinyl release through Rattleback Records this summer.
Dandelions: Gods Don’t Cry is beautifully paced, sonically cohesive with its spacious production and unshakably honest. It is as good as it gets when it comes to narrative hip-hop, a perfect representation of Kinsey’s effort to present the music as a literary artform.
On April 19, Kinsey unveiled the album at Tala, a gallery and contemporary art space in West Town. Dressed head-to-toe in vibrant yellow with a dandelion tucked into the folds of his durag, Kinsey commanded everyone’s attention as he drifted between the minimalist white interior of the gallery’s main room and the warm candle-lit library in the back. Dandelions were strategically placed in each room amidst the photographs on the wall and the books on coffee tables and shelves of the library. Surrounded by friends, family and collaborators, the rhythms of the album filled the space and sucked you in. Kinsey even picked up the mic to perform a song when the audience’s attention seemed to be dwindling.
Tony Santiago, who worked with Kinsey for a University of Chicago archive called the South Side Home Movie Project, is quick to highlight the gravity Kinsey brings to a room.
“I think Roy just makes a room feel really, really sexy and intimate and inclusive,” Santiago said. “You have basically a really intellectual, very informed scholar who is down to change the space around him to reflect that.”
The level of intentionality present in every moment of the listening event is what makes Dandelions: Gods Don’t Cry more than just an album. It’s a full-fledged artistic vision that finds Kinsey covering new ground as an artist, and that’s probably because this project is a lifetime in the making.
Dandelions have been Kinsey’s favorite flower since he was a kid. When he first told me the album’s title, he proudly displayed the dandelion tattoo running along the back of his forearm. The petals of the three flowers blossom a few inches below his elbow.
On his way home from his afterschool program in elementary school, he would pick dandelions and bring them to his mother and grandmother, which his mom, Debra Kelly, remembers vividly.
“He would go out when they’d come home [from school] and he would go and pick flowers. He would come in with these handfuls of dandelions to give to me,” Kelly said with a reminiscent laugh. “To him, they were beautiful flowers. It just crushed him when somebody told him they were weeds.”
As hurtful as it was to hear an older kid disparage the plant he held so close to his heart, that couldn’t kill his love of the dandelion. It just made that appreciation change forms. After being enamored by the dandelion’s underappreciated beauty since childhood, Kinsey began to admire the dandelion’s resiliency as an adult.
“You’ve seen them grow in cracks in the pavement and hard soil. More times than not, they are preparing the soil for other flowers and things to grow because they put nitrogen in the soil,” Kinsey said. “When I learned how powerful it was, I was like, oh, I identify with that. Somebody probably once thought I was a weed.”
This is the ideological foundation upon which Kinsey has built this era of his artistic career. Dandelions must adapt to their environment without compromising their ability to grow, just as Kinsey has throughout his career. Whether he’s carving out his own space in the rap game or continuing to see his vision for the Rapbrary come to fruition, he does so with undeniable determination.
“I’m proud of the artist that he has become, and I’m proud that he has developed in such a way that he’s unapologetically Roy, and he doesn’t worry about what no one thinks about him,” Kelly said. “Now that he has bloomed, he stands on his own and he don’t need confirmation from no one.”
Kinsey hopes that his art and the Rapbrary will help individuals cultivate themselves through information, even though the book sanctuary’s final form has yet to reveal itself. As he zips up his jacket and steps back into the spitting rain, it’s clear to see that Kinsey embodies the dandelion: bright, resilient and ready to evolve.
Header by Kiernan Sullivan
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