Kevin Coval

Kevin Coval is the editor of The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and is the author of Schtick, L-vis Lives!: Racemusic Poems, Everyday People, Slingshots: A Hip-Hop Poetica and the play, This is Modern Art, co-written with Idris Goodwin. Founder of Louder Than A Bomb: The Chicago Youth Poetry Festival and the Artistic Director of Young Chicago Authors, Coval teaches hip-hop aesthetics at The University of Illinois-Chicago, is a 4x HBO Def Poet and has written for a wide variety of publications including CNN.com, Huffington Post, and Fake Shore Drive. The Chicago Tribune‘s called him “the voice of the new Chicago” and the Boston Globe says he’s “the city’s unofficial poet laureate.” This is Modern Art is forthcoming in the Spring of 2016 on Haymarket Books, and Coval’s A People’s History of Chicago is due out in the Spring of 2017, also on Haymarket Books.