Rendezvous Resistance at St. Xavier University

feat. Kevin Coval reading from What i Will Tell My Jewish Kids and L-vis Lives!

Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - 6:30pm

St.Xavier Univeristy

Warde Academic Center, McGuire Hall 18230 Orland Parkway,

Orland Park, IL 60467

See map: Google Maps

Performances will include:

hip hop artist, Gon (http://www.urchin-studios.com/gonbio2.htm)

spoken word artist, Kevin Coval (info below)

SXU's own Cultural Diversity Club's step team with an original step routine & IMPROV

if you or someone you know has poems, spoken word pieces, or want to share any form of art under the theme of resistance, solidarity and struggle, email us at m.abdelrazik7@gmail.com by Friday, 10/28

This event is cosponsored by IMPROV, Mercy Students for Peace and Justice, The Cultural Diversity Club, and The Alliance

FREE

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L-vis Lives! is a bold new collection of poetry and prose exploring the collision of race, art, and appropriation in hip hop culture. L-vis is an imagined persona: a representation of artists who have used and misused Black music. Like so many others who gained fame and fortune from their sampling, L-vis is as much a sincere artist as he is a thief. In Kevin Coval's poems, L-vis' story is equal parts autobiography, forgotten history, and re-imaginings. We see shades of Elvis Presley, the Beastie Boys, and Eminem, and meet some of history's more obscure “whiteboy” heroes and anti-heroes: legendary breakdancers, political activists, and music impresarios. A story of both artistic theft and radical invention, L-vis Lives! is a poetic novella on all of the possibilities and problems of “post-racial” American culture.

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.

"Kevin Coval is a new, glowing voice in the world of literature. In his voice is our hope for a new world of peace, grace and beauty."
—Studs Terkel

“The new voice of Chicago... brilliant, funny, magnificent and intensely personal.”
—Chicago Tribune

“One of my favorite poets.”
—Mos Def

* * *

IF YOU would like to discuss hosting a reading, performance, workshop, or screening, please contact Jon Kurinsky at Jon@haymarketbooks.org. For media requests, please contact Sarah Macaraeg at Sarah@haymarketbooks.org.

MORE INFORMATION on L-vis Lives!, including an excerpt and advance praise, can be found at:
http://www.haymarketbooks.org/pb/L-vis-Lives

Part of the L-Vis Lives!: Racemusic Poems Release Tour.