Nate Marshall

Kevin Coval

Quraysh Lansana

A first-of-its-kind anthology of hip-hop poetica written for and by the people.

New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop

The BreakBeat Poets

Named "Best Chicago Poet" by The Chicago Reader, Kevin Coval channels Howard Zinn to celebrate the Windy City's hidden history.

A People's History of Chicago

Javon Johnson

The End of Chiraq: A Literary Mixtape is a collection of poems, rap lyrics, short stories, essays, interviews, and artwork about Chicago, the city that came to be known as "Chiraq" ("Chicago" + "Iraq"), and the people who live in its vibrant and occasionally violent neighborhoods. Tuned to the work of Chicago’s youth, especially the emerging artists and activists surrounding Young Chicago Authors, this literary mixtape unpacks the meanings of “Chiraq” as both a vexed term and a space of possibility. "Chiraq" has come to connote the violence—interpersonal and structural—that many Chicago youth regularly experience. But the contributors to The End of Chiraq show that Chicago is much more than Chiraq. Instead, they demonstrate how young people are thinking and mobilizing, engaged in a process of creating a new and safer world for themselves, their communities, and their city. In true mixtape fashion, the book is an exercise in "low end theory" that does not just include so-called underground and marginal voices, but foregrounds them. Edited by award-winning poets, writers, and teachers Javon Johnson and Kevin Coval, The End of Chiraq addresses head-on the troublesome relationship between Chicago and Chiraq and envisions a future in which both might be transformed.

A Literary Mixtape

The End of Chiraq

1989, the number is an exploration of the year 1989 through politics, personal history and culture. This chapbook plays like a mixtape incorporating the hottest records and stories of 89 and reflecting their relevance for today.

1989, The Number

Schtick is a tale of Jewish assimilation and its discontents: a sweeping exposition on Jewish American culture in all its bawdy, contradictory, inventive glory. Exploring—in his own family and in culture and politics at large—how Jews have shed their minority status in the United States, poet Kevin Coval shows us a people’s transformation out of diaspora, landing on both sides of the color line.

Schtick

Joe Sacco

Eileen Myles

Bao Phi

Naomi Shihab Nye

Ahdaf Soueif

Natalie Diaz

Hisham Matar

Yazan Khalili

George Abraham

Hala Alyan

Najwan Darwish

Sahar Mustafah

Naomi Wallace

Marc Lamont Hill

Khaled Mattawa

Jehan Bseiso

Nathalie Handal

Fargo Tbakhi

Ed Bok Lee

Donal O'Kelly

Fady Joudah

Zaina Alsous

Najla Said

Ismail Khalidi

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

Lina AlSharif

Janan Alexandra

Zeina Azzam

Bryonn Bain

Summer Farah

Mandy Shunnarah

Marking seventy years of displacement and occupation in Palestine, Mizna presents The Palestine Issue, centering the Palestinian struggle for liberation and the rich literature it has spurred, guest edited by playwright and poet Ismail Khalidi. Acclaimed authors engage with seven decades of resilience and creativity in the face of catastrophe, sharing work that combats erasure by remembering, as well as by imagining possible (and impossible) futures.

The Palestine Issue

Mizna

L-vis Lives! in this poetic novella on the collision of race, art, and appropriation in American culture.

Racemusic Poems

L-vis Lives!

A unique artistic tribute to a Chicago neighborhood lost to gentrification: “Kevin Coval made me understand what it is to be a poet” (Chance the Rapper, Grammy winner and activist). Everything Must Go is an illustrated collection of poems in the spirit of a graphic novel, a collaboration between poet Kevin Coval and illustrator Langston Allston. The book celebrates Chicago’s Wicker Park in the late 1990s, Coval’s home as a young artist, the ancestral neighborhood of his forebears, and a vibrant enclave populated by colorful characters. Allston’s illustrations honor the neighborhood as it once was, before gentrification remade it. The book excavates and mourns that which has been lost in transition and serves as a template for understanding the process of displacement and reinvention currently reshaping American cities. “Chicago’s unofficial poet laureate.” —NPR

The Life and Death of an American Neighborhood

Everything Must Go

Quraysh Ali Lansana

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.

Idris Goodwin

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.

A Play

This Is Modern Art

Kevin Coval

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