Kevin Coval Celebrates Chicago History in Poetry and Hip-Hop at Driehaus Museum
there was a time when hip-hop felt like a secret society of wizards and wordsmiths. Magicians meant to find you or that you were meant to find like rappers i listened to and memorized in history class talked specifically to me, for me.“Chicago 21 Plan” critiques the real estate developers who tried to stabilize a large wealthy neighborhood: “a plan to centralize in the loop / to build a mote, a fortress, a gold / coast. gold mine. mine. take dead / tracks & build condos. river norths / south loops to stave off white flight ….” Coval closed by reading the final poem in the book, “Chicago Has My Heart,” which ends like this: “we rise, Chicago / this body / politic will rise / our fire will burn / again.” Listen to Coval read “Chicago Has My Heart.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti7OMtC2bUU The book opens with a foreword by Chance the Rapper, who calls Coval “my artistic father.” Portraits of some of Chicago’s famous citizens by artists including Hebru Brantley, Bianca Pastel and Max Sansing illustrate the book. You can buy Kevin Coval’s A People’s History of Chicago (Haymarket Books, 135 pp, 2017) from bookstores or online booksellers. The price is usually $17 but buy it now for $12.
#A People's History of Chicago#Chance the Rapper#Hebru Brantley#Howard Zinn#Jane Addams#Jean Baptiste Point DuSable#Kevin Coval
Nancy S Bishop
Nancy S. Bishop is publisher and Stages editor of Third Coast Review. She’s a member of the American Theatre Critics Association and a 2014 Fellow of the National Critics Institute at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. You can read her personal writing on pop culture at nancybishopsjournal.com, and follow her on Twitter @nsbishop. She also writes about film, books, art, architecture and design.