About this item
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 1990's, 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.
About the Author
KEVIN COVAL is the author of ALA "Book of the Year" finalist Slingshots: A Hip-Hop Poetica and Everyday People. He is also the Artistic Director of Louder Than a Bomb: The Chicago Teen Poetry Festival which he co-founded. Coval has performed at hundreds of universities, high schools, synagogues, and theaters in seven countries on four continents. A regular contributor to Chicago Public Radio and a four-time HBO Def Poet, Coval is former poet-in-residence at The Jane Addams' Hull House Museum and is currently faculty at The School of the Art Institute. He has taught creative writing and spoken-word performance workshops in Chicago high schools for over ten years.
