Ishmael Reed
(b. 1938)

Ishmael Reed is considered to be one of the leading African American authors of his time. He has written nine novels, five collections of poetry, four books of essays, and several plays. In 1971, he co-founded the Yardbird Publishing Corporation in Berkeley, California. In 1976, he co-founded the Before Columbus Foundation, a producer and distributor of the work of unknown ethnic writers.

When Reed was four, his family moved from Chattanooga, Tennessee to Buffalo, New York. He began his literary career there at the age of 14, writing a regular jazz column for the Empire State Weekly. He attended public school in Buffalo and then attended the State University of New York at Buffalo from 1956 to 1960. At the age of 22, he moved to New York City and worked as a journalist. In 1962, Reed joined the Umbra Writer's Workshop in New York, the first major post-sixties organization of black writers, where he began writing poetry.

Reed's first novel The Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967) is a satire of Newark, New Jersey politics. In fact, Reed is regarded as one of the greatest satirists in America since Mark Twain. Reed says of his writing, "Many people here called my fiction muddled, crazy, incoherent, because I've attempted in fiction the techniques and forms painters, dancers, filmmakers, musicians in the West have taken for granted for at least 50 years, and the artists of many other cultures, for thousands of years."

Reed has taught at Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth, and for 20 years he has been a lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley. He lives in Oakland, California.

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