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.

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.