Kevin Coval

Kevin Coval is the poet The Chicago Tribune called “the voice of the new Chicago” and who The Boston Globe says is “the city’s unofficial poet laureate.” Author of Schtick, L-vis Lives!: Racemusic Poems, Everyday People, Slingshots: A Hip-Hop Poetica, and More Shit Chief Keef Don’t Like, Coval is the founder of Louder Than A Bomb: The Chicago Youth Poetry Festival and Artistic Director of Young Chicago Authors, LTAB’s non-profit home. 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, The Chicago Tribune, Huffington Post, National Public Radio’s Chicago affiliate WBEZ, The Spoken Word Revolution Redux (Source), Handbook of Public Pedagogy (Routledge), 101 Changemakers: Rebels and Radicals Who Changed U.S. History (Haymarket), and It Was Written: Reading Nas’s Illmatic, ed. by Michael Eric Dyson (Basic). Coval won a New Voices/New Visions award from the Kennedy Center for a play co-authored with Idris Goodwin about graffiti writers called, This Is Modern Art, which will premiere in the winter of 2015 at Steppenwolf Theater, and is currently editing an anthology, The Breakbeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop (Haymarket), due out February 2015.

Follow Kevin Coval: @kevincoval | Facebook | Kevin on Haymarket Books | Young Chicago Authors

Rhymes: Herbie Hancock, "Rockit"; Boogie Down Productions, "Why Is That?"; A Tribe Called Quest, "Scenario"