Check the Method: A Summer Spoken Word Camp
July 9-13
led by Kevin Coval

For the second summer in a row, Young Chicago Authors will sponsor Check the Method : A Summer Spoken Word Camp led by Kevin Coval. The camp is graciously co-sponsored and held at the historic Hull House Museum located at 800 S. Halstead. The camp is open to writers age 15-21 and will take place from 11am to 4pm every day in the second week of July. The camp will focus on the writer in community and city, a metaphoric imaging of the commitment to place and people that Jane Addams herself lead in her lifetime and legacy.  Last year's camp brought 20 young writers from all over the city and suburbs together to explore techniques and writing practice, culminating in a week end reading and performance. This summer that reading will take place at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, Friday July 13 at 7pm. Check the Method will encourage and push writers toward new work, thorough revision, and broadening of the reading palette and practice. Writers should have experience in the writing and performing of poetry. 3 poems must be submitted as application to Kevin Coval via email, k@melekyonin.com , by June 15 . Please include in your email, name, phone #, age, school attended and year in school. There is a sliding scale $100 camp fee. If you can not afford $100, please apply anyway, no one will be turned away for lack of loot. If you can pay anything please do, if you can not, no worries. Lunch and a CTA pass for the week are included.  Workshop space is limited, early applications will be considered first. With any questions please email Kevin. Kevin Coval is the author of Slingshots (A Hip-Hop Poetica) which was named Book of the Year-finalist by The American Library Association. Coval's writing has appeared in The Spoken Word Revolution and The Spoken Word Revolution: Redux (Source Books), Total Chaos (Basic Civitas), I Speak of the City: New York City Poems (Columbia University Press), Awakening The Spirit (Skylight Paths), Chicago Tribune, and can be heard regularly on Chicago Public Radio, where he is resident poet and hip-hop correspondent. Coval has performed on four continents in seven countries including; The Parliament of the World's Religions in Capetown, South Africa, The African Hip-Hop Festival: Battle Cry, Poetry Society of London, Yale, Stanford, St. Xavier's College in Bombay, India, and four seasons of Russell Simmons' HBO Def Poetry Jam, for which he also serves as artistic consultant.  Co-Founder of Louder Than A Bomb: The Chicago Teen Poetry Festival, the largest youth poetry festival in the world, Coval is a professor at The School of the Art Institute in Chicago and for over ten years has been teaching hip-hop poetics in high schools and colleges around the country Rick Kogan of the Chicago Tribune has said Coval, he is the Voice of the new Chicago... should stand up there with the work of Carl Sandburg, and I don't say that lightly .