Books in the BreakBeat Poets series

Award-winning poet Cheryl Boyce-Taylor pays tribute to her departed son Malik 'Phife Dawg' Taylor of the legendary hip-hop trio A Tribe Called Quest in this intimate collection.

Award-winning poet and playwright Idris Goodwin interrogates and remixes our cultural past in order to make sense of our present and potential futures.

Kevin Coval and Idris Goodwin pay poetic homage to slam dunk virtuoso Dominique Wilkins, and creativity & improvisation in the game of basketball.

This easy-to-use guide explains how to recruit, nourish, and fortify writers of color through innovative reading, writing, workshop, critique, and assessment strategies.

Merging documentary poetry from the epicenter of an epidemic with the story of viruses in the evolution of humanity, If God Is A Virus gives voice to the infected and the virus.

A BreakBeat Poets anthology that opposes silence and re-mixes the soundtrack of the Latinx diaspora across diverse poetic traditions.

In his highly anticipated second poetry collection, Doppelgangbanger, Cortney Lamar Charleston examines the performance of Black masculinity in the U.S., and its relationship to family, love and community.

Kara Jackson's Bloodstone Cowboy is a reclamation of her lineage, an affirmation of self, and a declaration of her right to contain multitudes. These poems from the 2019 National Youth Poet Laureate complicate the definition of womanhood, troubling what it means to live in a body and love it. A complex and resilient love permeates Jackson's writing, from anthems praising her full belly to poems grappling with "sort-of" love for her midwestern hometown.Drawing on the rich traditions of Lucille Clifton and Sharon Olds, this expansive collection proudly claims the inheritance of her family's southern roots, while carving out space for Jackson to exist fully without shame. As she writes, "when the day calls I will answer to my name / claim it"

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

A BreakBeat Poets anthology to celebrate and canonize the words of Black women across the diaspora.

A first-of-its-kind anthology of hip-hop poetica written for and by the people.

Patricia Frazier's Graphite is an ode to her grandmother and childhood home, the Ida B. Wells Projects, both which the poet lost to city- and state-sanctioned discrimination. The chapbook investigates loss and gentrification, particularly their effects on black young people from Chicago, whose political movement, resilience, and ability to make celebration after pain, drive these poems.

A refreshing, unapologetic intervention into ongoing conversations about the line between sexual freedom and sexual exploitation.

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.