John Russell Rickford (born September 16, 1949 in Georgetown, Guyana) is a Guyanese academic and author. His book Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English, which he wrote together with his son, Russell J. Rickford, won the American Book Award in 2000. Rickford is the J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor of Linguistics and the Humanities at Stanford University's Department of Linguistics and the Stanford Graduate School of Education, where he has taught since 1980.