Javon Johnson is an assistant professor of African American Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and the director of African American and African diaspora studies. He is the author of Killing Poetry: Blackness and the Making of Slam and Spoken Word Communities (2017) and is an award-winning spoken word poet who has appeared on HBO, BET, and TVOne.

Kevin Coval is the founder of Louder Than a Bomb: The Chicago Youth Poetry Festival and artistic director of Young Chicago Authors. He is the coeditor of The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop (2015); author of A People’s History of Chicago, Schtick, L-vis Lives!, and Slingshots (A Hip-Hop Poetica); and author (with Idris Goodwin) of This Is Modern Art.