Life and career
Reed was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and grew up in Buffalo, New York, where he attended the University of Buffalo, a private university that became part of the state public university system after he left. The university awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1995.
In 1998, Reed spoke about his influences in an interview: "I've…
probably been more influenced by poets than by novelists — the Harlem Renaissance poets, the Beat poets, the American surrealist Ted Joans. Poets have to be more attuned to originality, coming up with lines and associations the ordinary prose writer wouldn't think of."
He moved to New York City in 1962 and co-founded with Walter Bowart the East Village Other, a well-known underground publication. He was also a member of the Umbra Writers Workshop, an organization among whose members were some that helped establish the Black Arts Movement and promoted a Black Aesthetic. Although Reed was never a participant in that movement, he has continued to research the history of black Americans, and while working on his novel, Flight to Canada, coined the term "Neo-Slave narrative." He used the term in 1984 in "A Conversation with Ishmael Reed" by Reginald Martin.
In 2005, Reed retired from teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught for thirty-five years, and is currently Visiting Scholar at California College of the Arts. He lives in Oakland, California, with his wife of more than 40 years, Carla Blank, the acclaimed author, choreographer, and director.[13] His archives are located in Special Collections at the University of Delaware in Newark. Reed's author-maintained website appears at www.ishmaelreed.org.
Published works
Reed's published works include his ten novels. Among his other books are six collections of poetry, including New and Collected Poems, 1964–2007; ten collections of essays, most recently Going Too Far: Essays About America's Nervous Breakdown (2012); one farce, Cab Calloway Stands In for the Moon or The Hexorcism of Noxon D Awful (1970); one libretto, Gethsemane Park; a sampler collection, The Reed Reader (2000); two travelogues, of which the most recent is Blues City: A Walk in Oakland (2003); and six plays, collected by Dalkey Archive Press as Ishmael Reed, The Plays (2009).
He has also edited 13 anthologies, the most recent of which is POW WOW, Charting the Fault Lines in the American Experience—Short Fiction from Then to Now (2009), a collection of the work of 63 writers, co-edited with Carla Blank. Spanning more than 200 years of American writing, Reed in his "Foreword" calls it "a gathering of voices from the different American tribes." POW WOW is the fiction companion anthology to From Totems to Hip-Hop: A Multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas, 1900–2002 (2003), in which Reed endorses an open definition of American poetry as an amalgamation, which should include work found in the traditional canon of European-influenced American poetry as well as work by immigrants, hip hop artists, and Native Americans. The 2013 Signet Classic edition of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn features a new Afterword by Ishmael Reed.
Since the early 1970s, Ishmael Reed has championed the work of other contemporary writers, founding and serving as editor and publisher of various small presses and journals. His current publishing imprint is Ishmael Reed Publishing Company, and his online literary magazine, Konch, features poetry, essays and fiction.[14] Reed is one of the producers of The Domestic Crusaders, a two-act play about Muslim Pakistani Americans written by his former student, Wajahat Ali.Its first act was performed at the Kennedy Center's Millennium Hall in Washington, D.C., on November 14, 2010, and remains archived on their website.
