A People’s History of Chicago
by Kevin Coval
with a forward by Chance the Rapper
& illustrations by Hebru Brantley and five other Chicago visual artists
Please join the Chinese American Museum of Chicago in celebrating Chicago’s diversity and history through the lens of poet Kevin Coval.
Kevin will be reading from his collection A People’s History of Chicago, followed by an interactive session to solicit stories to add to the fabric of minority experiences.
Copies of the book will be available for purchase.
This event is FREE to attend, but registration is strongly recommended.
Kevin Coval is the author of everyday people and slingshots (a hip-hop poetica), named Book of the Year-finalist by The American Library Association. Coval has performed at hundreds of universities, high schools and theaters in seven countries on four continents including; The Parliament of the World’s Religions in Capetown, South Africa, The African Hip-Hop Festival: Battle Cry, Poetry Society of London, University of the West Indies in Jamaica, St. Xavier’s College in Bombay, India, and four seasons of Russell Simmons’ HBO Def Poetry Jam, for which he also served as artistic consultant.
Coval’s writing has appeared in The Spoken Word Revolution and The Spoken Word Revolution: Redux (Source Books), Total Chaos (Basic Civitas), I Speak of the City: New York City Poems (Columbia University Press), The Bandana Republic (Soft Skull Press), Chicago Tribune, Chicago Reporter, Cross Currents, Crab Orchard Review, seen on C-Span, WGN, and can be heard regularly on Chicago Public Radio, where is resident poet and hip-hop correspondent. Founder of Louder Than A Bomb: The Chicago Teen Poetry Festival, the largest youth poetry festival in the world, Coval is poet-in-residence at The Jane Addams’ Hull House Museum, faculty at The School of the Art Institute and University of Illinois-Chicago and Minister of Hip-Hop Poetics at The University of Wisconsin-Madison. For over ten years, Kevin has been teaching hip-hop poetics in high schools and colleges around the country.
