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 seventy-seven poems (for the city's seventy-seven 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 Iis 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.?

Auteur

Kevin Coval is a poet and community builder. As the artistic director of Young Chicago Authors, founder of Louder Than A Bomb: The Chicago Youth Poetry Festival, and professor at the University of Illinois-Chicagöwhere he teaches hip-hop aesthetics he's mentored thousands of young writers, artists and musicians.

He is the author and editor of ten books, including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and Schtick, and co-author of the play, This is Modern Art. His work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, The Drunken Boat, Chicago Tribune, CNN, Fake Shore Drive, Huffington Post, and four seasons of HBO's Def Poetry Jam.

Contenu

1. chicagu

2. shikaakwa

3. LaSalle wrote it down wrong

4. the father is a Black man

5. The Treaty of Chicago

6. player with railroads

7. hog butcher for the world

8. Albert Parsons can hang

9. how to be down

10. the L gets open

11. the white city

12. Eugene Debs reads Marx in prison

13. reversing the flow / \ / of the Chicago river

14. The Burnham Plan of Chicago

15. The Great Migration

16. The Eastland Disaster

17. the murder of Eugene Williams

18. Society for Human Rights

19. Thomas Dorsey, Gospel's Daddy

20. Katherine Dunham opens her dance school

21. Gwendolyn Brooks stands in The Mecca

22. The South Side Writer's Group (a broke cento)

23. Hansberry vs. Lee

24. Muddy Waters goes electric

25. Nelson Algren meets Simone de Beauvoir at the palmer house

26. pickle with a peppermint stick

27. Sun Ra becomes a synthesizer

28. hugh hefner, a play boy

29. the Black monk of wrigley field

30. University of Illinois-Chicago

31. at the Roberts Temple Church of G-d, 4021 S. StateSt.

32. The Division Street Riots

33. Martin Luther King prays in marquette park

34. Chicago/america's greatest listener

35. Carl Sandburg Village (where my parents met)

36. Wall of Respect

37. AfriCOBRA

38. the wrestler: a chicago poster boy

39. The Assassination of Chairman Fred Hampton

40. Ray Yoshida, Chicago Imagist, Dotted Charmer

41. don l. lee becomes Haki Madhubuti

42. The Chicago 21 Plan

43. new town

44. leaving Aldine

45. Disco Demolition

46. mayor byrne moves into & out of Cabrini Green

47. Ron Hardy plays the record backwards

48. the assignation of Rudy Lozano

49. Marc Smith invents the poetry slam

50. collateral damage

51. The Day Harold Died

52. the year Michael Jordan breaks the law

53. patronage

54. fresh to death

55. molemen beat tapes

56. mayor daley wishes the white city (a Chi-ku)

57. Graffiti Blasters: an erasure

58. NAFTA

59. The 1994 World Cup (a second city improv sketch)

60. The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act

61. The Etymology of Chicago Joe

62. Common's Resurrection

63. the supreme court makes color illegal

64. Erasing the Green

65. Ida B. Wells testifies in the ghost town of The Ida B. Wells Homes

66. how to teach poetry in Chicago public schools

67. Lenard Clark peddles for air

68. baby come on: an ode to footwork

69. Juice serves eminem at Scribble Jam

70. A Moratorium on the Death Penalty

71. praise the house party

72. Día de las Madres

73. the crown fountain in millennium park

74. Kanye says what's on everybody's mind

75. The White Sox win the World Series: Pop's ars poetica

76. the coach is a bear

77. i wasn't in grant park when obama was elected

78. Republic Window Workers Sit-in

79. A Eulogy for Jeff Maldonado Jr.

80. the night the modern wing was bombed

81. Falling Up

82. when King Louie first heard the word chiraq

83. an elegy for Dr. Margaret Burroughs

84. a dedication to the inaugural poet

85. rod blagojevich at the end of his run

86. HeyMa is trending on Mother's Day

87. memoir of the red x

88. Teachers Strike in The Chicago Tradition

89. we real

90. standards

91. during Ramadan the gates of heaven are open

92. Chicago Cultural Center: a battle rap

93. Ms. Devine explains the meaning of Modern Art: a found poem

94. 82 shot, 14 murdered: the two cities celebrate independence day

95. why Derrick Rose

96. We Charge Genocide

97. there is a target on the grave of Cabrini Green

98. atoning for the neo-liberal in all or rahm emmanuel as the chicken on Kapparot

99. 400 days

100. Chicago has my heart