Kevin Coval – författare

FROM THE POET the Chicago Tribune calls “the new voice of Chicago,” comes L-vis Lives!, a bold new collection of poetry and prose exploring the collision of race, art, and appropriation in American culture.

L-vis is an imagined persona, a representation of artists who have used and misused Black music. Like so many others who gained fame and fortune from their sampling, L-vis is as much a sincere artist as he is a thief. In Kevin Coval''s poems, L-vis'' story is equal parts forgotten history, autobiography, and re-imaginings. We see shades of Elvis Presley, the Beastie Boys, and Eminem, and meet some of history''s more obscure “whiteboy” heroes and anti-heroes: legendary breakdancers, political activists, and music impresarios.

A story of both artistic theft and radical invention, L-vis Lives! is a poetic novella on all of the possibilities and problems of “post-racial” American culture—where Black art is still at times only fully accepted in a white face, and every once in a while an “L-vis” comes along to step in to the void.

i am a heroto most. the great hopeof something other.a complex back-story.something other thanthe business of my father.bland’s antonym.jim crow’s black sheep.the forgotten sonleft to rise in the darknessamong the discarded in the wildof working class, singlemother hoods. a herowho transcendswho translates the dissatisfactions of the plains;kids of kurt cobain,method man amphetamine,the odd Iowan who digs dirtand lights beyond the pig yard,spits nebraskan argot,hero to the heartland, middle brow(n) america

Hip-Hop is the largest youth culture in the history of the planet rock. This is the first poetry anthology by and for the Hip-Hop generation.It has produced generations of artists who have revolutionized their genre(s) by applying the aesthetic innovations of the culture. The BreakBeat Poets features 78 poets, born somewhere between 1961-1999, All-City and Coast-to-Coast, who are creating the next and now movement(s) in American letters.The BreakBeat Poets is for people who love Hip-Hop, for fans of the culture, for people who''ve never read a poem, for people who thought poems were only something done by dead white dudes who got lost in a forest, and for poetry heads. This anthology is meant to expand the idea of who a poet is and what a poem is for.The BreakBeat Poets are the scribes recording and remixing a fuller spectrum of experience of what it means to be alive in this moment. The BreakBeat Poets are a break with the past and an honoring of the tradition(s), an undeniable body expanding the canon for the fresher.

Graffiti crews are willing to risk anything for their art. Called vandals, criminals, even creative terrorists, graffiti artists set out to make their voices heard and alter the way people view the world. But when one crew finishes the biggest graffiti bomb of their careers, the consequences get serious and spark a public debate asking, "Where does art belong?"

Kevin Coval is the author of Schtick, L-vis Lives, the American Library Association "Book of the Year" Finalist Slingshots: A Hip-Hop Poetica, and an editor of The BreakBeat Poets.

Idris Goodwin is a playwright, spoken-word performer, and essayist recognized across mediums by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ford Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation.