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About Ishmael Reed

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.