A People's History of Chicago

By: Kevin Coval

Narrated by: Kevin Coval, Jamila Woods

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 Coval’s A People’s 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 77 poems (for the city’s 77 neighborhoods) honor the everyday lives and enduring resistance of the city’s 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 Is 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 city’s unofficial poet laureate."

©2017 Kevin Coval (P)2018 Kevin Coval

Better in Print

love this book and the performance. However, this is one book that is better in print.

I do like the structure of 1 poem= 1 chapter though because I can share them with others and the performance is much better than me reading it out loud