Novelist poet playwright songwriter essayist activist and MacArthur genius Ishmael Reed
has been a major figure in American letters for the past four decades. His ground-breaking
literary output has inspired generations of artists and writers - from Thomas Pynchon Paul
Beatty and Colson Whitehead to 2pac George Clinton and David Murray - and he is widely
recognized as one of the great American writers. Reed was born in 1938. He grew up in
working-class neighbourhoods in Buffalo New York attended Buffalo public schools and the
University of Buffalo. He taught at Harvard Yale Dartmouth and for thirty-five years at the
University of California Berkeley. He lives in Oakland California where he teaches at the
California College of the Arts.
