Ishmael Reed is an essayist, a novelist, a poet, and a playwright, having won prizes in all categories. He is the author of Airing Dirty Laundry, Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media, and Juice, and a former professor at the University of California–Berkeley as well as at Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth. He lives in Oakland, California.
“In the past 40 years, Reed has published more than 20 books and
has also made his mark as an editor, publisher, critic, journalist,
songwriter, librettist, and fearsome letter-to-the-editor writer. .
. . Reed is among the most American of American writers, if by
‘American’ we mean a quality defined by its indefinability and its
perpetual transformations as new ideas, influences and traditions
enter our cultural conversation.” —New York Times
“Just when you think that Reed is exaggerating or being
one-dimensional in his analysis of racial issues, he’ll open
another page of American history and show you something new.”
—David Homel, Rover Arts
“There is brutal candor in Reed’s argument, which often feels
refreshing in light of the euphemisms and platitudes typically
expressed in both polite discourse and the media’s self-scrutiny. .
. . Whether or not one agrees with Reed, one can only be
entertained by his gleeful barbs and edgy turns-of-phrase. He names
names and shames with derision.” —Caroline Brown, English
professor, Université de Montréal for Montreal Review of Books
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