Kevin Coval (with cap) at the Kalamazoo Public Library.

Kevin Coval is an American poet. Coval is a Chicago-based writer who is known for exploring topics such as race, hip-hop culture, Chicago history, and Jewish-American identity in his work.^[1][2][3] He is also known for his appearances in four seasons of the Peabody Award-winning television series Def Poetry Jam on HBO.^{[4][5] [6]}

Education

Coval attended Glenbrook North High School, graduating in 1993.^[7] After high school, Coval attended Ohio University, briefly studying abroad at Swansea University before he left school to play semi-pro basketball in Wales.^[8]

Career

In 1996, Coval returned to Chicago and began working different jobs to pay rent, including as a furniture delivery man, caterer, and waiter. He also began performing his poetry at open mics around the city.^[8]

In 1997, Coval became a regular at open mics at the Alt-X bookstore.^[8] He went on to perform at venues such as Mad Bar, Estelle’s, and the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge.^[7]

Coval was named artistic director of Young Chicago Authors, an organization that sends professional writers to schools to teach, in 1999.^[9]

In 2001, Coval co-founded the youth performance-poetry competition Louder Than a Bomb with Anna West. By 2017, the competition was considered the largest youth performance-poetry competition in the world.^[9]

Coval was removed from his position as artistic director at Young Chicago, after accusations that he had ignored sexual assault allegations within the organization.^[10][11]

Poetry

His 2017 collection A People's History of Chicago, whose title is inspired by Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, comments in 77 poems, one for each neighborhood in Chicago, on the city, its history, and the people that live in it, from its Native American beginnings and its appropriation by whites to the present day, the inauguration of Rahm Emanuel and the World Series win by the Chicago Cubs. Along the way he comments on Robert de LaSalle's mispronunciation of the Native American word "checagou", which he bastardizes with his "misshapen mouth", erasing its original history.^[5]

In 2019, Coval published the poetry collection Everything Must Go: Life and Death of an American Neighborhood, which examined the topic of gentrification in Wicker Park, Chicago and featured illustrations from Langston Allston.^[12][13] The collection was a finalist for the 2019 Chicago Review of Books Award for Poetry.^[14]

Coval has also published poems in several anthologies, including Born to Use Mics: Reading Nas’s Illmatic,^[15] Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop,^[16] The Spoken Word Revolution: Slam, Hip-Hop, & the Poetry of a New Generation,^[17] and The Spoken Word Revolution Redux.^[18] 

References