ISHMAEL REED
Author of twenty-seven published books to date, Ishmael Reed is a novelist, poet, playwright, and essayist. He is also a publisher, editor of thirteen anthologies and numerous magazines, blogger for the San Francisco Chronicle, television producer, media commentator, teacher and lecturer. A 1972 manifesto inspired a major visual art exhibit and book, “NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith,” curated by Franklin Sirmans for The Menil Collection in Houston, where it opened June 27, 2008, and , through 2009, subsequently traveled to P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York City, and the Miami Art Museum .
In 2010, Reed’s most recent essay collection, Barack Obama and The Jim Crow Media, Or The Return of the “Nigger Breakers”, was published by Canada’s Baraka Press. His 2009 publications include Ishmael Reed, the plays, a collection of his six plays (Dalkey Archive Press), and Powwow, Charting the Fault Lines in the American Experience: Short Fiction From Then to Now (Da Capo Press), an anthology edited by Reed with Carla Blank. Two new works are forthcoming: Juice!, a novel, from Dalkey Archive Press, in April, 2011; and The Fighter and the Writer, a non-fiction work from Random House.
In 2008, Da Capo Press published Mixing It Up:Taking On The Media Bullies & Other Reflections, an essay collection. New and Collected Poems, 1964-2006 (Carroll & Graf, 2006), released in a revised paperback edition, New and Collected Poems, 1964-2007 (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2007), was listed as one of the four best books of poetry published in 2006 by The New York Times Book Review, and in June, 2007, was awarded the California Gold Medal in Poetry by the Commonwealth Club. Three books written or edited by Reed were published in 2003: Thunder’s Mouth Press published From Totems to Hip-Hop: A Multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas, 1900-2002; the Perseus division of Basic Books published a collection of Reed’s essays, Another Day at the Front; and The Crown Publishing Group published his non-fiction travel book, Blues City: A Walk in Oakland. In 2000, Basic Books published The Reed Reader, a collection of his writing including excerpts from his nine published novels, selected essays, published and previously unpublished poetry, and two plays, Hubba City and The Preacher and the Rapper. Popular anthologies he has edited include MultiAmerica: Essays in Cultural War and Cultural Peace (Viking, 1997), and the four-volume Literary Mosaic Series (HarperCollinsCollege, 1995-96). Other books by Reed include his nine novels Japanese By Spring, The Terrible Twos, The Terrible Threes, Reckless Eyeballing, Mumbo Jumbo, The Last Days of Louisiana Red, Flight to Canada, Yellow-Back Radio Broke-Down, and The Free-Lance Pallbearers; and collected essays Another Day at the Front, Airing Dirty Laundry and Writin’ is Fightin’. His online literary magazine, Konch, featuring poetry, essays andfiction, can be found at www.ishmaelreedpub.com. His blog is located at www.sfgate.com.
Ishmael Reed is a founder and member of the board of directors of the Before Columbus Foundation, which since 1980 has annually presented the American Book Awards; the Oakland chapter of PEN; and There City Cinema, an organization that furthers the distribution and discussion of films from throughout the world. Two of his books have been nominated for National Book Awards, and a book of poetry, Conjure, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. A poem written in Seattle in 1969, “Beware Do Not Read This Poem,” has been cited by Gale Research Company as one of the approximately 20 poems that teachers and librarians have identified as the most frequently studied in literature courses. Harold Bloom designated Mumbo Jumbo one of the 500 important books of the Western canon. “Library Journal” called From Totems to Hip-Hop “outstanding” and “one of the four best poetry anthologies of 2003.”
Ishmael Reed has received writing fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts, and National Endowment and New York State Council of the Arts fellowships for publishing and video production. In 1995, he received the Langston Hughes Medal, awarded by City College of New York. In 1997, he received the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Award, establishing a 3-year collaboration with the Oakland based Second Start Literacy Project in 1998. In 1998, he also received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship award. In 1999, he received a Fred Cody Award from the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association, and was inducted into Chicago State University’s National Literary Hall of Fame of Writers of African Descent. In 2002, he received a Rene Castillo OTTO Award for Political Theatre and in 2003 he received a Barnes & Noble Writer for Writers Award, and a Phillis Wheatley Award from the Harlem Book Fair. In 2004, he was honored with a Robert Kirsch Award, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize; the D.C. Area Writing Project’s 2nd Annual Exemplary Writer’s Award; the Martin Millennial Writers, Inc. Contribution to Southern Arts Award, in Memphis, Tennessee; and an invitation to speak at Stanford University’s Bill and Jean Lane Lecture Series.
Ishmael Reed was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and grew up in working class neighborhoods in Buffalo, New York. He attended Buffalo public schools, and from 1956 to 1959 was enrolled at the University of Buffalo, which awarded him an honorary Doctorate of Letters in 1995. In 1998 he received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Johnson C. Smith University at Charlotte, North Carolina. For over thirty years, he taught creative writing courses in the English Department at the University of California, at Berkeley, retiring as of January, 2005. During the 2005 Spring semester, he was a Visiting Artist/Scholar at San Jose State University, holding the Lurie Chair in Creative Writing. He has also taught at Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, and the University of the Antilles in Martinique, among other appointments. In 1989 he received a University of California Humanities Fellowship to complete his novel, Japanese By Spring, and received two fellowships from the African Studies Center to continue his studies of the Yoruba language. In 1991, he received an American Cultures Fellowship from U.C., Berkeley to produce an original television drama. He has also studied Japanese for ten years, under private tutors. In 1993, he was one of two Americans to receive the Hanayagi Award, bestowed upon international artists by the Osaka Community Foundation.
Ishmael Reed’s texts and lyrics have been performed, composed or set to music by Albert Ayler, David Murray, Allan Touissant, Carman Moore, Taj Mahal, Olu Dara, Lester Bowie, Carla Bley, Steve Swallow, Ravi Coltrane, Leo Nocentelli, Eddie Harris, Carla Bley, Steve Swallow, Bobby Womack, Milton Cardonna, Omar Sosa, Jack Bruce, Little Jimmy Scott, Robert Jason, Alvin Youngblood Hart, Mary Wilson of the Supremes and others. He has been the central participant in the longest ongoing music/poetry collaboration, known as Conjure projects, produced by Kip Hanrahan on American Clavé: Conjure I (1984) and Conjure II (1988), which were reissued by Rounder Records in 1995; and Conjure Bad Mouth (2005), whose compositions were developed in live Conjure band performances, from 2003 to 2004, including engagements at Paris’ Banlieues Bleues, London’s Barbican, and the Blue Note Café in Tokyo. The Village Voice ranked the most recent Conjure CD one of four best spoken word albums released in 2006. During Esprits D’Afrique, a Paris festival presented by 3D Family and the Dapper Museum in April 2002, Reed debuted as a composer, when David Murray performed his composition, 9/11. Reed’s other music collaborations most recently were at NYC’s Knitting Factory, with violinist Billy Bang at Yoshi’s, and with pianist Mary Watkins at the San Francisco Public Library. Sacred Ground, a 2007 independent film with a score by David Murray, includes Reed’s lyrics for the title track and “Prophet of Doom,” with vocal by Cassandra Wilson, and was selected for Sundance Film Festival and PBS television station airings. Two of the film’s pieces were first performed by Ishmael Reed on his privately produced CD, For All We Know (2007), along with nine jazz standards and one other original collaboration with David Murray, who appears as a performer in the Ishmael Reed Quintet, which includes Reed on piano, Roger Glenn on flute, Chris Planas on guitar, and Carla Blank on violin. In 2008, he was honored as Blues Songwriter of the Year from the West Coast Blues Hall of Fame Awards. A David Murray CD released in 2009, The Devil Tried to Kill Me, includes two songs with lyrics by Reed: “Afrika,” sung by Taj Mahal, and the title song performed by SF based rapper, Sista Kee.
In November 2010, New York City’s Nuyorican Poets’ Café produced a retrospective of excerpts from Ishmael Reed plays, directed by Rome Neal. Reed’s two act drama, Body Parts, premiered at the Nuyorican in October, 2007, as a significantly revised version of Tough Love, which premiered in November, 2004, at Berkeley’s Black Repertory Theater. His video projects include a soap opera, Personal Problems, directed by Bill Gunn; A Word In Edgewise, a conversation with writer, Al Young; The Only Language She Knows, a collaboration with writer, Genny Lim; and Savage Wilds, a play by Reed originally mounted in an Oakland production at Ed Bullins’ BMT theater, directed by Vern Henderson and later produced by Miguel Algarin and directed by Rome Neal at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Four other Reed plays, including Hubba City, The Preacher and the Rapper, C Above C Above High C, and a musical version of Mother Hubbard have also received productions at the Nuyorican, under Rome Neal’s direction. A “gospera,” Gethsemane Park, with libretto by Reed and music composed by Carman Moore, was premiered April 1, 1998 at Berkeley’s Black Repertory Theater, and restaged in April, 1999 by San Francisco’s Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, under the direction of Stanley Williams, and in July, 2000 at the Nuyorican Poets Café, with Rome Neal directing. Besides the new Dalkey Archive publication, 3 Reed plays appear in ACTION, plays from the Nuyorican Theater Festival.
Reed’s novels, poetry and essays have been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, Japanese, Hebrew, Korean, Chinese, Hungarian, Dutch, and Czech. His poems, articles and book reviews have appeared in The Yale Review, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, the Amsterdam News, the Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Wall Street Journal, Newsday, Life, Spin, Connoisseur, Scholastic Magazine, Le Monde, The Japan Times Weekly, The Village Voice, Artbyte, the San Francisco Examiner, the San Francisco Chronicle, The New Yorker, Time, Playboy, Black Renaissance Noire, Comparative American Studies, Salon.com, Counterpunch.com and many other print and online news media and scholarly sources in the U.S. and abroad.
Since the early 1970s, Ishmael Reed has championed the work of other writers, founding and serving as editor and publisher of various small presses and journals. His current publishing imprint, Ishmael Reed Publishing Company, published two anthologies of Nigerian writing: 25 New Nigerian Poets (2000) edited by Toyin Adewale, and Short Stories by 16 Nigerian Women (2005) edited by Toyin Adewale-Gabriel. Other titles include Black Girl from Tannery Flats (2003), the memoirs of his mother, Thelma V. Reed; New and Collected Poems by Kathryn Takara (2003); Un Poco Low Coup by Amiri Baraka (2004); poetry collections from four women poets based in northern California: Under Burning White Sky (2005) by Boadiba, Swallowing Watermelons by Karla Brundage (2006), City Beautiful by Tennessee Reed (2006), and After Altamira by Neli Moody (2006); and Maggie 3, a novel by Alison Mills Newman (2007). In 2011 the press will publish New and Selected Yuri, a collection of poetry and fiction by Japan based writer Yuri Kageyama.
Reed is also a founder andmember of the board of PEN Oakland, and was formerly on the board of the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, where he conducted a master’s residency in writing during summer, 2002, and debuted as a jazz pianist on their INside/OUT performance, collaborating with Carla Blank on violin and choreographer/ dancer Doug Elkins. He is also a fellow of Harvard’s Signet Society and Yale’s Calhoun House. He serves as Producer for The Domestic Crusader Project, helping mount productions of new plays by Wajahat Ali, his former UC, Berkeley student. Ali’s The Domestic Crusaders enjoyed sold-out audiences and world-wide media attention at its NYC premiere production at the Nuyorican Poets Café in Fall, 2009, and in 2010 made its international debut at MuslimFest in Mississauga, Canada, and was shown at the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Hall, where the performance of Act I continues to be shown among their website’s archival videos.
Reed lives in Oakland’s Inner City with his wife, Carla Blank, a writer, choreographer, and director. He has two daughters, both writers, named Timothy Reed and Tennessee Reed. Reed currently contributes to his community through his neighborhood association. His archives are maintained at the University of Delaware’s Special Collections, in Newark, Delaware.
