In Only God Can Judge Me: The Many Lives of Tupac Shakur, the biographer unpacks Tupac Shakur’s origins, contradictions, and artistic legacy.

Your previous books have been about sports—what motivated the shift to music?

This is my 11th book, 10 are sports books. And when I told my agent I want to write a Tupac book, he was like, “Really? Tupac?” Having grown up a hip-hop fan and a Tupac fan, I always wanted a book where the author digs deep into the subject’s past. You hear Tupac’s from Baltimore, and went to the Baltimore School for the Arts. But I’ve never read the book that takes me into the Baltimore School for the Arts. He went to prison at Clinton [in Dannemora, N.Y.]—I’ve never been taken into Clinton. I wanted to write that kind of book—the book I wanted to read about Tupac.

You interviewed a wide array of people whose lives intersected with Tupac’s—how did you decide whom to reach out to?

I just call everybody. I’m serious about that. As an example, I get his high school yearbook, and I go name by name, and make a file for every single person, not just classmates, but people who worked at the school—teachers, janitors, principals. All these people, because Tupac wound up being famous, are going to have their memory of him.

Which interview did you find most revelatory?

I spent a lot of time with a woman named Yaasmyn Fula. She was, among other things, Tupac’s mother’s friend. She’s a former Black Panther who helped raise Tupac, and later to manage his career. Having gone into this book as a kind of outsider—a white sports writer who hasn’t written about hip-hop very much—it was really helpful to have people to explain generational Black trauma, and the trauma from the Panther 21 trial and from Tupac’s mother being pregnant with him while incarcerated. Yaasmyn was really important for me in that.

What do you see as Tupac’s legacy?

I think in a lot of ways his legacy is he was unafraid of speaking up—back then, it could be about police brutality, there are a million different things. I think he was aware his life would probably be short, and he lived knowing that.

There’s a lot of great information in the book for Tupac fans—what do you think might stand out the most?

One of the things that’s really amazing is the speed with which he wrote. To me, Tupac, more than anything, is a writer—and more than anything, a poet. They teach you in journalism and in writing to be direct in the way you express yourself, and he was super direct. If he was mad at you, it was very clear in his writing. If he was in love, it was very clear in his writing. He really was a beautiful poet who happened to make hip-hop his medium.