Thursday, May 11, 2017
6:00pm 7:30pm
Bookends & Beginnings Bookstore
Kevin Coval is a poet and community builder. As the artistic director of Young Chicago Authors, founder of Louder Than A Bomb: The Chicago Youth Poetry Festival, and professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago—where he teaches hip-hop aesthetics—he’s mentored thousands of young writers, artists, and musicians. He is the author and editor of 10 books, and will read from his new book, A People’s History of Chicago (Haymarket Books). Coval writes, “A People’s History of Chicago flips to the b-side of history in the tradition of Howard Zinn, Ida B. Wells, and other narrators who counter american terror and mainstream whitewashing. The country employs erasure to the histories of People of Color, and seeks to revise the progressive and radical history of the working class in america. I’m out to set the record straight—to remix it and dig in the crates; to rescue and retell some of the best and most radical and real and celebratory and difficult parts of our Chicago story we oftentimes forget or didn’t know in the first place.”