Kevin Coval is an award-winning American poet, author, activist, and community builder. He is the founding editor of The BreakBeat Poets imprint of Haymarket Books, as well as both the director of the Young Chicago Authors organization and Louder Than a Bomb – the world’s largest youth poetry festival.

In September 2019, Kevin released Everything Must Go: The Life and Death of an American Neighborhood, an illustrated collection of poems that celebrates Chicago’s Wicker Park in the late 1990s.

His other published work includes 1989, The Number, This Is Modern Art, A People’s History of Chicago, and The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop.

Kevin is a four-time HBO Def Poet and is former poet-in-residence at The Jane Addams' Hull House Museum.

Poetry, Spoken Word Poetry Authors, Activists, Community Improvement,