Ishmael Reed Biography

The author of 28 published books to date, Ishmael Reed is a novelist, poet, playwright, and essayist. He is also a publisher, editor of 13 anthologies and numerous magazines, television producer, public media commentator, teacher, and lecturer. His tenth novel, Juice!, published by Dalkey Archive Press in April 2011, includes over 20 of his cartoons.

Reed is also a radio and television commentator, and a founder of The Before Columbus Foundation, which annually presents the American Book Awards; the Oakland chapter of PEN; and There City Cinema, an organization which furthers the distribution and discuss of films throughout the world.

Two of Reed's books have been nominated for National Book Awards, and a book of poetry, Conjure, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He has received writing fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, along with National Endowment and New York State Council of the Arts fellowships for publishing and video production. In 1991, he received an American Cultures Fellowship from the University of California-Berkeley to produce an original television drama.

Among his other honors, he became a MacArthur Fellow in1998, the same year he received a Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Award, for which he maintained a three-year collaboration with the Oakland-based Second Start Literacy Project. He received a Fred Cody Award from the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association (1999), the same year he was inducted into Chicago State University's National Literary Hall of Fame of Writers of African Descent, and a Langston Hughes Medal, awarded by City College of New York (1995). In 2002, he received a Rene Castillo OTTO Award for Political Theatre and in 2003 he received a Barnes & Noble Writer for Writers Award and a Phillis Wheatley Award from the Harlem Book Fair. In 2004, he was honored with a Robert Kirsch Award, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize; the D.C. Area Writing Project's 2nd Annual Exemplary Writer's Award, and the Martin Millennial Writers, Inc.'s Contribution to Southern Arts Award, in Memphis, Tennessee.

For 29 years, Reed has been a lecturer at the University of California-Berkeley; he has also taught at Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, and the University of the Antilles in Martinique. He recently received a fellowship to continue studies of the Yoruba language, and has studied Japanese for five years under private tutors. In 1993, Reed was one of two Americans to receive the Hanayagi Award, bestowed upon international artists by the Osaka Community Foundation.

Reed's articles and book reviews have appeared in many newspapers and magazines in the United States and abroad, including the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and Washington Post, as well as Scholastic Magazine and The Japan Times Weekly. His novels and essays have been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, German, and Dutch.

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