The BreakBeat Poets

New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop

Kevin Coval, Quraysh Ali Lansana, Nate Marshall, Kevin Coval, Quraysh Ali Lansana, Nate Marshall

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781608464500
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Poesía

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.

Biographies

Editors

Kevin Coval is the author of Schtick, L-vis Lives!: Racemusic Poems, Everyday People, Slingshots: A Hip-Hop Poetica, and More Shit Chief Keef Don’t Like. Coval is the founder of Louder Than A Bomb: The Chicago Youth Poetry Festival and artistic director of Young Chicago Authors. Coval won a New Voices/New Visions award from the Kennedy Center for a play coauthored with Idris Goodwin about graffiti writers called This is Modern Art, which premiered at Steppenwolf Theater.

Quraysh Ali Lansana is the author of eight poetry books, three textbooks, and a children’s book, the editor of eight anthologies, and the coauthor of a book of pedagogy. He is a faculty member of the Creative Writing Program of the School of the Art Institute and the Red Earth MFA Creative Writing Program at Oklahoma City University. He is also a former faculty member of the Drama Division of the Juilliard School. Lansana served as director of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing at Chicago State University from 2002 to 2011, where he was also associate professor of english/creative writing. Our Difficult Sunlight: A Guide to Poetry, Literacy and Social Justice in Classroom & Community (with Georgia A. Popoff) was published in March 2011 by Teachers & Writers Collaborative and was a 2012 NAACP Image Award nominee. His most recent books include The Walmart Republic, with Christopher Stewart (Mongrel Empire Press, September 2014), and reluctant minivan (Living Arts Press, May 2014).

Nate Marshall is from the South Side of Chicago. His first book, Wild Hundreds, won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize and is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press. He received his MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Center at the University of Michigan and is a Cave Canem Fellow. His work has appeared in Poetry, the New Republic, and elsewhere. Nate won the 2014 Hurston/Wright Founding Members Award and the 2013 Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Award. He is a founding member of the poetry collective Dark Noise. He is also a rapper.

Contributors

Benjamin Alfaro is a Detroit-based writer and teaching artist. He is the coauthor of a collaborative poetry collection, Home Court (Red Beard Press, 2014) and has been published widely. He is a writer in residence and youth leadership coordinator with the InsideOut Literary Arts Project, serving area high schools and community centers.

Lemon Andersen is a Brooklyn-based playwright, television writer, brand creative, and Tony Award–winning poet. He has been interviewed and profiled by National Public Radio, the New York Times, NBC, and the Wall Street Journal and published in the Nation magazine. His engaged YouTube audience totals upwards of one million viewers.

Fatimah Asghar is a poet, scholar, and perfor...