Ishmael Reed was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and grew up in working class neighborhoods in Buffalo, New York. He attended Buffalo public schools, and from 1956 to 1959 was enrolled at the University of Buffalo, which awarded him an honorary Doctorate of Letters in 1995. In 1998 he received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Johnson C. Smith University at Charlotte, North Carolina. For over thirty years, he taught creative writing courses in the English Department at the University of California, at Berkeley, retiring as of January, 2005. Now a Distinguished Professor at California College of the Arts, where he teaches creative writing, he also taught a Spring 2019 poetry writing class at UC Berkeley. Currently Distinguished Professor at California College of the Arts, teaching poetry writing or fiction during the Spring semester, during the 2005 Spring semester, he was a Visiting Artist/Scholar at San Jose State University, holding the Lurie Chair in Creative Writing. He has also taught at Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, and the University of the Antilles in Martinique, among other appointments. In 1989 he received a University of California Humanities Fellowship to complete his novel, Japanese By Spring, and received two fellowships from the African Studies Center to continue his studies of the Yoruba language. In 1991, he received an American Cultures Fellowship from U.C., Berkeley to produce an original television drama.
Author of more than thirty published books to date, Ishmael Reed is a novelist, poet, playwright, lyricist and essayist. His most recent novel, Conjugating Hindi, was published in April, 2018 by Dalkey Archive Press. His most recent non-fiction publication, The Complete Muhammad Ali, was published in 2015 by Baraka Books of Montreal.
He has been the recipient of the MacArthur Genius Grant, has been a Pulitzer finalist, and he has been nominated twice for the National Book Award. Reed’s most recent honors include the 2018 Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History Award and the 2017 AUDELCO Pioneer Award for the Theater. LitQuake, the yearly San Francisco Literary Festival, honored Ishmael Reed with their 2011 Barbary Coast Award.
Send questions, comments and corrections to info@creativewritingmfa.info.
Disclaimer: No endorsement of these ratings should be implied by the writers and writing programs listed on this site, or by the editors and publishers of Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, Best American Poetry, The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Pushcart Prize Anthology.