Ishmael Reed

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Ishmael Scott Reed (born 22 February 1938) is an American poet, essayist, and novelist. Reed is, along with Toni Morrison and Amiri Baraka, among the very best known African-American writers of their generation. His work consistently satirizes the American political culture, highlighting domestic, political and cultural oppression.

Contents 1 Life and career 2 Inspiration 3 Bibliography 4 Further reading 5 References 6 External links

[edit] Life and career

Reed was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, but 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. He moved to New York City in 1962 and co-founded with the late Walter Bowart the East Village Other, a well-known underground publication. He was also a member of the Umbra Writers Workshop, an organization that helped establish the Black Arts Movement and promoted a Black Aesthetic.

Reed's published works include his nine novels:The Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967, Reed's first novel), Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969), Mumbo Jumbo (1972), Flight to Canada (1976), The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974), Reckless Eyeballing (1986), The Terrible Twos (1982), The Terrible Threes (1989) and Japanese By Spring (1993). His other published books include: six collections of poetry, of which the most recent is New and Collected Poems, 1964-2007; eight collections of essays, of which the most recent is Mixing It Up: Taking on the Media and other Reflections (2008); 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); and six plays, recently collected by Dalkey Archive Press as Ishmael Reed, The Plays (2009).

He has also edited thirteen anthologies, of which the most recent is POW WOW, Charting the Fault Lines in the American Experience--Short Fiction from Then to Now (2009), a collection of 63 writers co-edited with Carla Blank. Spanning over 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.

Ishmael Reed is a founder 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. His New and Collected Poems, 1964-2007, received the Commonwealth Club of California's Gold Medal. 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. Reed’s novels, poetry and essays have been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, Japanese, Hebrew, Hungarian, Dutch, Korean, Chinese and Czech, among other languages.

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, Cassandra Wilson 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. 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 2007, he made his debut as a Jazz pianist and bandleader with For All We Know by The Ishmael Reed Quintet.

Among Ishmael Reed's other honors are writing fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts. In 1995, he received the Langston Hughes Medal, awarded by City College of New York; in 1997, 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. Other awards include a Rene Castillo OTTO Award for Political Theatre (2002); a Phillis Wheatley Award from the Harlem Book Fair (2003); and in 2004, a Robert Kirsch Award, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, besides the D.C. Area Writing Project’s 2nd Annual Exemplary Writer’s Award and the Martin Millennial Writers, Inc. Contribution to Southern Arts Award, in Memphis, Tennessee. A 1972 manifesto inspired a major visual art exhibit, NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith, curated by Franklin Sirmans for The Menil Collection in Houston, where it opened June 27, 2008, and subsequently traveled to P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York City, and the Miami Art Museum through 2009.

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 is Ishmael Reed Publishing Company, and his online literary magazine, Konch, featuring poetry, essays and fiction, can be found at www.ishmaelreedpub.com. 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.^[1]

Reed recently retired from teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught for thirty-five years. He currently lives in Oakland, California with his wife of almost 40 years, Carla Blank, the acclaimed author, choreographer, & director.^[2] His archives are located at the University of Delaware.

[edit] Inspiration

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."^[3]

[edit] Bibliography

• The Freelance Pallbearers, 1967
• Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, 1969
• catechism of d neoamerican hoodoo church, 1969
• 19 Necromancers From Now, 1970
• Cab Calloway Stands in for the Moon or The Hexorcism of Noxon D Awful, 1970
• Mumbo Jumbo, 1972
• Neo-HooDoo Manifesto, 1972
• Conjure: Selected Poems, 1963-1970, 1972
• Chattanooga: Poems, 1973
• The Last Days of Louisiana Red, 1974
• Flight to Canada, 1976
• Califia: The California Poetry , 1978
• Yardbird Lives!, 1978
• Secretary to the Spirits, 1978
• Shrovetide in Old New Orleans: Essays, 1978
• The Terrible Twos, 1982
• God Made Alaska for the Indians: Selected Essays, 1982
• Reckless Eyeballing, 1986
• New and Collected Poetry,1988
• Writing is Fighting: Thirty-Seven Years of Boxing on Paper, 1988
• The Terrible Threes, 1989
• The Before Columbus Foundation Fiction Anthology: Selections from the American Book Awards 1980-1990, 1991
• The Before Columbus Poetry Anthology, Selections from the American Book Awards, 1980-1990, 1991
• Airing Dirty Laundry, 1993
• Japanese by Spring, 1993
• Conversations with Ishmael Reed, ed. Amritjit Singh and Bruce Dick, 1995
• Oakland Rhapsody, The Secret Soul Of An American Downtown, with photographs by Richard Nagler, 1995.
• The HarperCollins Literary Mosaic Series, General Editor of 4 anthologies edited by Gerald Vizenor, Shawn Wong, Nicolas Kanellos and Al Young, 1995-1996
• MultiAmerica, Essays on Cultural Wars and Cultural Peace, 1997
• Gethsemane Park, libretto; Carman Moore, composer (premiere, Berkeley Black Repertory Theater, 1998)
• The Reed Reader, 2000
• Blues City: A Walk in Oakland, 2003
• Another Day at the Front, Dispatches from the Race War., 2003
• From Totems to Hip-Hop: A Multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas, 1900-2001, 2003
• Mixing It Up: Taking on the Media Bullies and Other Reflections, 2008
• POWWOW, 63 Writers Address the Fault Lines in the American Experience, 2009
• Ishmael Reed, THE PLAYS, 2009
• Barack Obama and The Media Bullies, or The Return of the “Nigger Breakers”, forthcoming 2010

[edit] Further reading

• Sirmans, Franklin, editor. NeoHooDoo, Art for a Forgotten Faith. New Haven and London: The Menil Foundation, Inc., distributed by Yale University Press, 2008. (Includes Sirmans' interview with Reed, pp.74-81.)

• Nishikawa, Kinohi. "Mumbo Jumbo." The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Multiethnic American Literature. Ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson. 5 vols. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005. 1552-53.

• Mvuyekure, Pierre-Damien, with a preface by Jerome Klinkowitz. The “Dark Heathenism” of the American Novelist Ishmael Reed, African Voodoo as American Literary Hoodoo. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, Ltd., 2007

• Hume. Kathryn. American Dream American Nightmare: Fiction Since 1960. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000.

• Dick, Bruce Allen, editor with the assistance of Pavel Zemliansky. The Critical Response to Ishmael Reed. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1999. (Includes Dick's 1997 telephone interview with Reed, pp. 228-250)

• McGee, Patrick. Ishmael Reed and the Ends of Race. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997.

• Ludwig, Sämi. Concrete Language: Intercultural Communication in Maxine Hong Kingston’s “The Woman Warrior” and Ishmael Reed’s “Mumbo Jumbo". Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, Cross Cultural Communication Vol. 2, 1996.

• Nazareth, Peter. In the Trickster Tradition:The Novels of Andrew Salkey, Francis Ebejar and Ishmael Reed. London: Bogle-L'Ouverture Pres Ltd., 1994.

• Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

• Martin, Reginald. Ishmael Reed & the New Black Aesthetic Critics. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988.

• O'Brien, John, editor. The Review of Contemporary Fiction Volume 4, Number 2, Summer, 1984. "Juan Goytisolo and Ishmael Reed Number"(Includes articles and interviews with Reed by Reginald Martin, Franco La Polla, Jerry H. Bryant, W.C. Bamberger, Joe Weixlmann, Peter Nazareth, James R. Lindroth, Geoffrey Green and Jack Byrne.)

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Pop Matters Review of Ishmael Reed's multicultural anthology "Pow Wow"
• Ishmael Reed Publications
• Ishmael Reed by Spring