In 1988, Dominque Wilkins & Michael Jordan squared off in Chicago for the most epic dunk contest in the history of the sport. 30 years later, poets & playwrights, Idris Goodwin & Kevin Coval, long-time collaborators, pay homage to the slam dunk, the anniversary of contest & to the moment & to the sport that changed culture in America & around the globe. Human Highlight: An Ode to Dominique Wilkins is a celebration of creativity, improvisation & the beauty & power in the game of basketball.

Graffiti crews are willing to risk anything for their art. Called vandals, criminals, even creative terrorists, graffiti artists set out to make their voices heard and alter the way people view the world. But when one crew finishes the biggest graffiti bomb of their careers, the consequences get serious and spark a public debate asking, 'Where does art belong?'

Known variously as "'the Windy City,"' "'the City of Big Shoulders,"' or "'Chi-Raq,"' Chicago is one of the most widely celebrated, routinely demonized, and thoroughly contested cities in the world. Chicago is the city of Gwendolyn Brooks and Chief Keef, Al Capone and Richard Wright, Lucy Parsons and Nelson Algren, Harold Washington and Studs Terkel. It is the city of Fred Hampton, House Music, and the Haymarket Martyrs. Writing in the tradition of Howard Zinn, Kevin Coval's A People's History of Chicago celebrates the history of this great American city from the perspective of those on the margins, whose stories often go untold. These seventy-seven poems (for the city's seventy-seven neighborhoods) honor the everyday lives and enduring resistance of the city's workers, poor people, and people of color, whose cultural and political revolutions continue to shape the social landscape. Kevin Coval is the poet/author/editor of seven books including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and the play, This Iis Modern Art, co-written with Idris Goodwin. Founder of Louder Than A Bomb: The Chicago Youth Poetry Festival and the Artistic Director of Young Chicago Authors, Coval teaches hip-hop aesthetics at the University of Illinois -Chicago. The Chicago Tribune has named him "the voice of the new Chicago" and the Boston Globe calls him "the city's unofficial poet laureate."

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.

Named Best Chicago Poet by The Chicago Reader, Kevin Coval channels Howard Zinn to celebrate the Windy City's hidden history. Known variously as the Windy City, the City of Big Shoulders or Chi-Raq, Chicago is one of the most widely celebrated, routinely demonized, and thoroughly contested cities in the world. Chicago is the city of Gwendolyn Brooks and Chief Keef, Al Capone and Richard Wright, Lucy Parsons and Nelson Algren, Harold Washington and Studs Terkel. It is the city of Fred Hampton, House Music, and the Haymarket Martyrs. Writing in the tradition of Howard Zinn, Kevin Coval's A People's History of Chicago celebrates the history of this great American city from the perspective of those on the margins, whose stories often go untold. These seventy-seven poems (for the city's seventy-seven neighborhoods) honor the everyday lives and enduring resistance of the city's workers, poor people, and people of color, whose cultural and political revolutions continue to shape the social l

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.

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.

Just as blues influenced the Harlem Renaissance and jazz influenced the Black Arts Movement, hip-hop's musical and cultural force has shaped the aesthetics of and given rise to a new generation of American poets.

Edited by poets Kevin Coval, Nate Marshall, and Quraysh Ali Lansana, "The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop" is the first anthology of poetry from the hip-hop generation. The BreakBeat Poets are multigenerational and multiracial. They are the real-life documentarians of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, employing traditional and wildstyle poetics to narrate a new country and city landscape.

Kevin Coval is the author of "Schtick," "L-vis Lives : Racemusic Poems," "Everyday People," and the American Library Association "Book of the Year" finalist "Slingshots: A Hip-Hop Poetica." He is the founder of Louder Than a Bomb: The Chicago Youth Poetry Festival, artistic director at Young Chicago Authors, and teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Nate Marshall is from the south side of Chicago. He is an MFA candidate in creative writing at the University of Michigan. His work has appeared in "Poetry" magazine, "Indiana Review," the "New Republic," " PANK] Online," and in many other publications.

Quraysh Ali Lansana is author of eight poetry books, three textbooks, and a children's book; editor of eight anthologies; and co-author of a book of pedagogy. He is associate professor of English and creative writing at Chicago State University. Two collections of his poetry will be released in 2014.

Schtick is the tale of Jewish assimilation and its discontents. It is a sweeping exposition on Jewish-American culture in all its bawdy, contradictory and inventive glory. Exploring how Jews shed minority status in America - in his own family and in culture and politics at large - up-and-coming poet Kevin Coval illustrates a people's transformation out of diaspora, landing on both sides of the colour line. Coval has been described as a new, glowing voice in the world of literature' by Studs Terkel.'

L-vis lives! A poetic journey of artists past and present who use and misuse Black culture, L-vis traces the story of an American archetype, from Elvis Presley to Eminem. All aspects of this cultural phenomenon - both positive and negative - are taken into account in Kevin Coval's fascinating and deeply moving collection. In this original poetry collection, Kevin Coval combines and re-imagines Elvis Presley, Eminem, the Beastie Boys and other artists who have used and misused black culture into a contemporary 'L-Vis' character.