Kevin Coval came to hip-hop in a very Chicago way: through the city’s vivid house music scene. As a teenager growing up in the suburb of Northbrook, Coval viewed house music’s “notion of radical inclusivity” as a treasured anomaly in an “intentionally segregated” city. From there, b-boy battles and emcee events didn’t seem such a stretch. Inspired by KRS-One, Queen Latifah, and Chuck D, rap eventually led Coval to the library, where he uncovered the texts of Malcolm X and Lerome Bennett, Jr., Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and Dudley Randall’s The Black Poets. By the time Coval moved back to Chicago in the mid-’90s, following college and an overseas stint playing basketball, he found himself in the middle of an emerging spoken word scene, where the same spaces used to showcase rappers also were used by poets.

“I’d been writing for like five years at that point, and eventually I was just the white dude in the room, and people were like, ‘my dude, are you gonna...read, or...?’” Coval tells Pitchfork. “There was interest and confusion and eventually I got put on the mic and became a practitioner. I thought of myself as a poet, but I wanted to rhyme, too.”

Two decades later, Coval has bridged that particular gap better than anyone else in his city. As the founder of the Louder Than a Bomb poetry festival and the artistic director for Young Chicago Authors, Coval has mentored and created safe spaces for some of the city’s brightest young creatives, including now-blossoming YCA alums Chance the Rapper, Noname, Saba, and Jamila Woods. He has released several books, including More Shit Chief Keef Don’t Like, Slingshots: A Hip-Hop Poetica, and the anthology The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, which brought together four generations of rap writers from across the country.

Now Coval takes inspiration from Howard Zinn with A People’s History of Chicago, his forthcoming poetry collection highlighting hidden histories within the dramatically segregated city. His goal extends beyond chronicling the city’s cultural innovators (from Sun Ra to Ron Hardy) and great political thinkers (from Ida B. Wells to Jane Addams). “I also wanted to share some of the stories where working people have organized and defeated great odds levied against them in order to achieve the benefits that we reap and receive now,” Coval says.

“Part of what I wanted to do in the book is tell how we got to this point in Chicago hip-hop culture, which is why I include the poem about the Molemen beat tapes, why I have an ode to Common’s Resurrection, why I talk about [King] Louie and [Chief] Keef,” he adds. “Prior to this moment there was a generation of Chicago emcees and producers that I was privy to and around, and in part this moment stands on the shoulders and in the legacy of that moment.” Certainly there’s an artistic through-line that holds, even as generations pass. “When Twista is on Saba’s record, what a victory for the West Side, what a victory for the whole city, and what a continuation of this poetic lineage that has very much to do with one another.”

In keeping with this hip-hop undercurrent, Chance the Rapper wrote the book’s foreword, which you can read below ahead of its April 11th release. Chance and Coval have been crossing paths at workshops and open mic nights for nearly a decade, and Coval booked some of Chance’s earliest shows. “Chance is not an overnight success—I met him when he was 14, so it takes 10 years to become an overnight success,” Coval says. “If you ask people in Chicago, they would say he was dope before 10 Day [from 2012]. There’s a slew of tapes with his friend Justin [J-Emcee] as Instrumentality that people in these youth cultural spaces vibed with and loved. One of those songs helped me through the mourning of my aunt Joyce… For me, one of the most powerful things about him is that from very early on I saw how serious he was about the craft.”