by Ishmael Reed
Reed’s activities in 2012 alone exemplify his position among the most well-known international writers and performers. Conjure, a band that has performed his poetry and songs since 1983, with various personnel including Bobby Womack, Taj Mahal, Jack Bruce, and Allen Toussaint, presented a concert at the Sardinia Jazz Festival. At the request of the US State Department, Reed visited middle schools and universities in East Jerusalem. He attended the launch of his new book, Going Too Far, in Montreal, joining the city’s mayor and a member of Quebec’s National Assembly. And he delivered the keynote address at a literary conference in Beijing.
Reed’s songs have been performed and recorded by Taj Mahal, Cassandra Wilson, the Roots, Mary Wilson of the Supremes, Little Jimmy Scott, Bobby Womack, and most recently, Macy Gray, among others. His writing has become a favorite of musicians. Funk star George Clinton, for instance, cites Reed’s novel Mumbo Jumbo as an inspiration, and the late rapper Tupac Shakur cites Reed in his song “And Still I Rise.” In 2012, Reed was named the first SFJAZZ Poet Laureate. Reed has performed with his band at Yoshi’s, the landmark San Francisco jazz club, and as a solo jazz pianist at Rome Neal’s Banana Puddin’ jazz series at the Nuyorican Poets Café in New York City. Reed’s first album, For All We Know (2007), features Reed on piano, his partner Carla Blank on violin, and David Murray on saxophone.
In 1965, with counterculture activist Walter Bowart, Reed named and helped co-found the East Village Other, or EVO, a biweekly paper that was an early example of the alternative press. In addition to frontline journalism from the cultural underground, EVO featured collages and early comics by such notable artists as Spain Rodriguez, Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman. Reed was also a member of the Umbra Writers Workshop, a collective of young black writers living in New York, which included David Henderson, Calvin Hernton, Tom Dent, Askia Touré, Lorenzo Thomas, and Joe Johnson.
Beginning with The Free-lance Pallbearers in 1967, Reed has published ten novels, including Mumbo Jumbo (1972), Flight to Canada (1976), and most recently, Juice! (2011). His writing spans other genres as well, including plays, essays, and poetry. In 1972, Reed was nominated for a National Book Award for Mumbo Jumbo and for his book of poetry, Conjure (1972). Conjure was also nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, while New and Collected Poems: 1964–2006 (2007) received a Gold Medal from the Commonwealth Club of California. Reed received the MacArthur Fellowship (otherwise known as the “genius grant”) in 1998.
Reed has attracted praise from such scholars and critics as Harold Bloom, for Mumbo Jumbo; Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, for his poetry; the New York Times music critic Jon Pareles, for his songs; and critic Clive Barnes, for his plays. Backstage, the New York theater trade magazine, compared him to Molière. In 1979, he won a Pushcart Prize for his essay “American Poetry: Is There a Center?” Reed’s cartoons have been published in the San Francisco Chronicle, Black Renaissance Noire, and the New York Amsterdam News.
Reed has also served as an editor for numerous anthologies, small presses, and publications. In 1976, he co-founded the Before Columbus Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes overlooked writers of diverse ethnicities and “a pan-cultural view of America.” The foundation has presented annual book awards for outstanding American literature since 1980, when Reed founded the American Book Awards, which the Washington Post describes as the American League to the National Book Awards’ National League.
In 1989, Reed founded PEN Oakland, a chapter of the PEN Center USA, with Floyd Salas and Claire Ortalda. The New York Times calls their group “the blue collar PEN.” The organization’s annual awards are named for the late University of California, Berkeley professor Josephine Miles.
Reed’s prolific output is unified by an interest in African American life and its wider relationships to American society. His work at times deploys parody and biting satire, using these to dissect repressively Eurocentric narratives of history and culture, and to critique dogma of all kinds. Advocating for a fully inclusive art, and marked by stylistic variety and playfulness, Reed’s work is sometimes described as postmodern. Its humor, however, is married to a passionate candor about history and social issues.
Reed’s wife is author and director Carla Blank. Blank’s recent work includes directing a play at the Kennedy Center, and collaborating with Robert Wilson on a work called “Kool: Dancing in My Mind,” which was performed at the Guggenheim Museum and made into a film called The Space in Back of You. Reed also has two daughters. Timothy, his daughter by a previous marriage, is the author of the novel Showing Out about the exploitation of strippers at a Times Square entertainment theater owned by a crime family. His youngest daughter, Tennessee, is a poet and author of Spell Albuquerque, her memoirs. They all live in Oakland, California.
Reed is pictured here as a young boy, between two and three years old.
Reed in the 1980s. Though he eventually went on to write ten novels, he initially found his inspiration in the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance and the beatniks.
Reed and the late Canadian Prime Minster Pierre Trudeau, at the 1986 International PEN Congress in New York City. (Photo courtesy of Quincy Troupe.)
The cast of Reed’s play Mother Hubbard, which was performed at the Nuyorican Poet's Café in 1998.
Reed stands at the Garden of Gethsemane in Jerusalem, around 2000.
Reed in Egypt.
Toni Morrison and Reed having breakfast at the InterContinental Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco, in December 2004. (Photo courtesy of Tennessee Reed.)
The cast of A Sampler of the Theater of Ishmael Reed. The photo was taken in Reed’s backyard, in April 2012.
Reed in Beijing in 2012.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
A Coming Attraction for This Work Entitled “Cab Calloway Stands In for the Moon” was published in Amistad 1 and 19 Necromancers From Now copyright © 1970 by Ishmael Reed.
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for the use of illustrations appearing within the text: Page 7: © 1971 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission; 14: Jose Fuentes; 61: Bonnie Kamin; 65: Fred McDarrah; 66: Underwood & Underwood; 77: Gerald Duane Coleman; 84: Courtesy, The Bancroft Library; 88: Copyright of Radio Times Hulton Picture Library; 118: Lincoln Center Library; 123: National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City; 145: Mark Citret; 145 top and bottom: Courtesy of Sengstacke Newspapers; 148: Courtesy Ohio Historical Society Library; 155: Copyright of Radio Times Hulton Picture Library; 161: Xavier Zeara; 163: © 1971 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission; 169: Basil Rakoczi; 181: Deutsches Archaeologisches Institut, Rome Italy; 184 top: International Publishers; 184 bottom: Gundar Strads; 210 both: From The American West by Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg. Copyright © 1955 by E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., and reproduced by permission; 215: Manchete Revista Semanal, Bloch Editores S.A., Brazil
Copyright © 1972 by Ishmael Reed
cover design by Angela Goddard
978-1-4532-8797-2
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