Chance The Rapper is a hero in his city of Chicago, as well as a great writer, so it only makes sense for the Coloring Book emcee to pen the foreword to Kevin Coval's book A People's History Of Chicago. As Reddit's HHH points out, the book has popped up as a preorder on Haymarket. Chancellor Bennett, who most know more commonly as Chance is listed as the author of the foreword, though there's no further reference to him in the description.
Find an excerpt from the summary below.
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 has been named "Best Chicago Poet" by the Chicago Reader, as well as being the author of seven books. He teaches a class on hip-hop aesthetics at the university of Illinois, which explains his choice to recruit Chance for the project.
The book is set to be released April 11th 2017. It is available for preorder here.
Tha last we heard, Chance was working on his first studio album after releasing 3 critically acclaimed mixtapes.
