Books by Kevin Coval

Award-winning poet Kevin Coval and graphic artist Langston Allston bare witness to the effects of gentrification in a Chicago neighborhood.

Known variously as the Windy City, the City of Big Shoulders, or Chi-Raq, Chicago is one of the most widely celebrated, routinely demonized, and thoroughly contested cities in the world.Chicago is the city of Gwendolyn Brooks and Chief Keef, Al Capone and Richard Wright, Lucy Parsons and Nelson Algren, Harold Washington and Studs Terkel. It is the city of Fred Hampton, House Music, and the Haymarket Martyrs. Writing in the tradition of Howard Zinn, Kevin Covals A Peoples History of Chicago celebrates the history of this great American city from the perspective of those on the margins, whose stories often go untold. These seventy-seven poems (for the citys seventy-seven neighborhoods) honor the everyday lives and enduring resistance of the citys workers, poor people, and people of color, whose cultural and political revolutions continue to shape the social landscape.Kevin Coval is the poet/author/editor of seven books including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and the play, This Iis 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. The Chicago Tribune has named him the voice of the new Chicago and the Boston Globe calls him the citys unofficial poet laureate.

Schtick is a tale of Jewish assimilation and its discontents: a sweeping exposition on Jewish American culture in all its bawdy, contradictory, inventive glory. Exploringin his own family and in culture and politics at largehow Jews have shed their minority status in the United States, poet Kevin Coval shows us a peoples transformation out of diaspora, landing on both sides of the color line.

A glimpse into the lives of anonymous graffiti artists that asks us to question the true purpose of art.