19 Facts About Ishmael Reed

Ishmael Scott Reed was born on February 22,1938 and is an American poet, novelist, essayist, songwriter, composer, playwright, editor and publisher known for his satirical works challenging American political culture.

Ishmael Reed's family moved to Buffalo, New York, when he was a child, during the Great Migration.

Ishmael Reed withdrew from college in his junior year, partly for financial reasons, but mainly because he felt he needed a new atmosphere to support his writing and music.

In 1962, Ishmael Reed moved to New York City and co-founded with Walter Bowart the East Village Other, which became a well-known underground publication.

Ishmael Reed was a member of the Umbra Writers Workshop, some of whose members helped establish the Black Arts Movement and promoted a Black Aesthetic.

In 1970, Ishmael Reed moved to the West Coast to begin teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught for 35 years.

Ishmael Reed's archives are held by the Special Collections at the University of Delaware in Newark.

Ishmael Reed has edited 15 anthologies, the most recent being Bigotry on Broadway, co-edited with his wife, Carla Blank, and published by Baraka Books of Montreal in September 2021.

Two of Ishmael Reed's books have been nominated for National Book Awards, both in 1973: his poetry collection Conjure, and his 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo.

In June 2018, in Detroit, Reed was honored with the Charles H Wright Museum of African American History Award.

On November 20,2017, Ishmael Reed received the AUDELCO Pioneer Award for the Theater.

Between 2012 and 2016, Ishmael Reed served as the first SF Jazz Poet Laureate from SF JAZZ, the leading non-profit jazz organization on the West Coast.

In 1998, Reed received a John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation Fellowship award.

Ishmael Reed has continued to champion the work of other contemporary writers, by founding and serving as editor and publisher of various small presses and journals since the early 1970s.

Reed's current publishing imprint is Ishmael Reed Publishing Company, and his online literary publication, Konch Magazine, features an international mix of poetry, essays and fiction.

Ishmael 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.

Similar contemporary authors that Ishmael Reed insists deny victim literature with a centralized black male villain are Amiri Baraka and Ed Bullins.

Ishmael Reed's piano playing was cited by Harper's Bazaar and Vogue as he accompanied a 2019 fashion show at the Serpentine Gallery in London, featuring the work of designer Grace Wales Bonner.

Ishmael Reed is the founder of the Before Columbus Foundation, which since 1980 has annually presented the American Book Awards and the Oakland chapter of PEN, known as the "blue-collar PEN", which gives annual awards to writers.