Tag Archive for 'kevin coval'

Kevin Coval Performs Poetry From L-Vis Lives!: Racemusic Poems

Oct ’11
12
7:00 pm

Spoken-word poet Kevin Coval, co-founder and Artistic Director of Louder Than a Bomb: The Chicago Youth Poetry Festival, will perform at Quimby’s in support of his third collection of poetry L-vis Lives! Racemusic Poems (Haymarket Books, September).

Coval, who has been hailed as “a new glowing voice in the world of literature” by Studs Terkel, explores the dynamic intersection of race and culture in America today with “L-vis,” an imagined persona and pastiche of artists who have used and misused Black music. In Coval’s poetic novella, L-vis’s story is equal parts autobiography and forgotten and re-imagined history. We see shades of Elvis Presley, the Beastie Boys, and Eminem, and meet some of history’s more obscure “whiteboy” heroes and antiheroes. A free audio preview of L-vis Lives!, with poems read by Coval and beats by Coolout Chris, can be heard here: http://bit.ly/oXSIxZ
“This book is bold, brave and morally messy – twelve rounds of knock-down, drag-out shadowboxing against a shapeshifter. The dark humor, intellectual fervor, and emotional rigor Coval brings to bear animates these pieces, turns caricatures to characters…”
—Adam Mansbach, author, Go the F**k to Sleep

For performance, interview, and review requests, contact: Jon Kurinsky, Haymarket Books, jon@haymarketbooks.org

Wed, Oct 12th, 7pm

from hero to most
i am a hero
to most. the great hope
of something other.
a complex back-story.
something other than
the business of my father.
bland’s antonym.
jim crow’s black sheep.
the forgotten son
left to rise in the darkness
among the dis
carded in the wild
of working class, single
mother hoods.

Kevin Coval at Quimby’s!

Oct ’08
30
7:00 pm

Join Kevin Coval as he reads and signs his new book of poetry Everyday People.

Kevin Coval is the author of everyday people (EM Press, Nov.’08) and slingshots (a hip-hop poetica) (EM Press, Nov. ’05), named Book of the Year-finalist by The American Library Association. Coval’s poems have 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, Rattle, 2nd Ave Poetry, The Drunken Boat, and many other periodicals and journals. Coval writes for The Huffington Post and can be heard regularly on National Public Radio in Chicago.

Coval has performed on four continents in seven countries 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. From Jan. 2006 to May 2007, Coval visited 26 states and more than 50 cities during the promotional tour for his first book, performing at over 150 high schools, universities, book stores, theaters, community centers and Union Halls around the country.

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 at The University of Illinois-Chicago and poet-in-residence at The University of Chicago’s Newberger Hillel Center, and teaches at The School of the Art Institute in Chicago.