Word: reed
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...only evidence of life in this room is Ishmael Reed himself, who sits casually behind the desk, a blue-and-white scarf wrapped around his neck. His iconoclastic modesty makes it obvious he is not comfortable at the center of this empty office; he talks as though he would rather be writing--alone and somewhere else...
...Ishmael Reed, who is a visiting professor of Afro-American Studies at Harvard this semester, is the author of seven novels, four books of poems, two collections of essays and editor and publisher of several anthologies. He has been hailed as a dominant voice in a new era of the Afro-American tradition. Literary critics describe him as the man who has overcome the conventions that limited Afro-American literature, as one who has successfully combined seemingly unrelated elements of Black written and oral expression to redefine the possibilities of the novel as a literary form...
...rejects simple characterization of his own work, he also refuses to accept the common vision of the world as divided into neat little oppositional packages like male/female, black/white, good/bad. While this attitude might be expected to result in nihilism, Reed's refusal to compartmentalize offers the possibility of an alternative system of connections not recognized by current society...
...Henry Louis Gates Jr., professor of English at Cornell University, says, "Reed names things for us, out loud, both that which we often do not even admit to ourselves--the private emotions--as well as those economic and racial relations by which this society seeks to regulate our lives, the invisible network within which we are bound, and which few will admit exists. Reed has the prophet's gift of vision. He tells us not only who we are, and where we as a society...
ISHMAEL SCOTT REED WAS BORN in Chattanooga, Tennessee on February 22, 1938, to Henry Lenoir, a fundraiser for the YMCA and Thelma Coleman, a homemaker and sales clerk. Later, his mother married Bennie Reed, an auto worker. In 1942, Reed moved with his mother to Buffalo, New York, where his mother worked in various wartime industries. As a teenager, he half-heartedly attended Buffalo public schools, he wrote a jazz column for a local newspaper in his spare time...