According to alumnus Kevin Coval (‘93), he spends his time listening to what the entire city of Chicago sounds like in the same room.

Coval is the co-founder of Louder Than a Bomb, which he said is the world’s largest youth poetry festival.

Louder Than a Bomb takes place in Chicago, and the festival is run like a competition that brings together crews of young writers, from ages 13 to 19.

“[What] we want to provide is a space for teenagers in the city who, in some ways, are the least heard from, are the most disenchanted and…the most disenfranchised,” said Coval. “We want to provide a space for that age group to be themselves.”

With more than 10,000 people expected in the audience and a radio broadcast on WBEZ: Chicago Public Radio, Coval said  audience members can hear topics ranging from police brutality to “funny pieces just about being an awkward teenager that wants to holler at someone they like.”

Coval said the purpose of the festival is to help branch the participants’ perspectives away from a stereotypical or “uniform ideology” about race or class and change the overall culture of Chicago.

“I think it helps shape the course of [the participants’] lives because it gives them confidence in their own stories,” said Coval. “…It gives them the ability to stand up and talk about who they are, who they care about, where they come from. It gives them the inquiry and curiosity to go explore the world.”

Coval relates Louder Than a Bomb’s mission to his personal high school goal to expand his own viewpoint and to escape the Northbrook “bubble.”

Social studies teacher Jeff Kallay said he remembers Coval as a student who had a passion for exploring. When Coval was 16 he bought a car and often drove to different parts of Chicago to experience the culture. He spent time going to record stores where he could embrace his interest in hip-hop.

Kallay also recalls asking Coval in high school to start a tutoring program with Gladstone Elementary, a school on the west side of Chicago. The program, G and G Basics, was a one-on-one program where 30 upperclassmen tutored their assigned elementary student for an hour and a half.

“It was kind of a mini big brother, big sister program,” said Kallay. “It wasn’t like you were coming and talking to some group of third graders from Gladstone Elementary. You were coming and talking to Latisha, and she was looking for you.”

Kallay wanted to make sure this tutoring program did not give off a patronizing attitude and said Coval understood that.

“[Coval] didn’t go in with an attitude of, ‘I’m better, and I’m going to fix things, and I know more than you,’” Kallay said.

Kallay said that the program helped tutors “humanize some issues of the city” by understanding the Gladstone kids were just “normal” kids who had fun, laughed and played, but did not “have the advantages that [the GBN] kids [have].”

“[The tutoring program] gave a name and a face to a person who otherwise was just a statistical anomaly,” Kallay said.

Coval said Louder than a Bomb is also a way to help put a face to different people of different parts of the city and to hear their stories.

“All of us carry essential stories,” said Coval. “I think a part of the work that I do as a poet and an educator is to create spaces for people to share those essential stories. The things that make us most us. Only you know your own lived, historical experience. Only you know what it’s like to be in your body, in your shoes, in your skin.”