,
Shawn Wong in 1975 In 1962, Reed moved to the
Lower East Side of New York City, and founded
Advance, a community newspaper for
Newark, New Jersey, Reed was also a member of the
Umbra Writers Workshop (he attended his first Umbra meeting in Spring 1963, with others present including
Lorenzo Thomas,
Askia Touré, Charles Patterson,
David Henderson, Albert Haynes, and
Calvin Hernton), some of whose members helped establish the
Black Arts Movement and promoted a Black Aesthetic. Although Reed never participated in that movement, he has continued to research the history of black Americans. While working on his novel
Flight to Canada (1976), he coined the term "Neo-Slave narrative", which he used in 1984 in "A Conversation with Ishmael Reed" by Reginald Martin. During this time, Reed also made connections with musicians and poets such as
Sun Ra,
Cecil Taylor, and
Albert Ayler, which contributed to Reed's vast experimentation with jazz and his love for music. Reed has served as editor and publisher of various small presses and journals since the early 1970s. These include
Yardbird Reader (which he edited from 1972 to 1976), and Reed, Cannon and Johnson Communications, an independent publishing house begun with
Steve Cannon and Joe Johnson that focused on multicultural literature in the 1970s. Reed's current publishing imprint is
Ishmael Reed Publishing Company, and his online literary publication,
Konch Magazine, features an international mix of poetry, essays and fiction. In 1970, Reed moved to the West Coast to begin teaching at the
University of California, Berkeley, where he taught for 35 years, retiring from there in 2005. Among the writers first published by Reed when they were students in his writing workshops are
Terry McMillan,
Mona Simpson,
Mitch Berman,
Kathryn Trueblood, Danny Romero,
Fae Myenne Ng, Brynn Saito, Mandy Kahn,
John Keene, and
Frank B. Wilderson III. Reed was one of the producers of
The Domestic Crusaders, a two-act play about Muslim Pakistani Americans written by his former student, Wajahat Ali. Its first act was performed at the
Kennedy Center's Millennium Hall in Washington, D.C., on November 14, 2010, archived on the center's website. Reed is the founder of the
Before Columbus Foundation, which since 1980 has annually presented the
American Book Awards and the
Oakland chapter of PEN,
Ishmael Reed: An Exhibition, curated by Timothy D. Murray, was shown at the University of Delaware Library from August 16 to December 16, 2007. established a three-year collaboration between the non-profit and Oakland-based Second Start Literacy Project in 1998. A 1972 manifesto inspired a major visual art exhibit,
NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith, curated by
Franklin Sirmans for the
Menil Collection in
Houston, Texas, where it opened on June 27, 2008, and subsequently traveled to
P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York City, and the
Miami Art Museum through 2009. Between 2012 and 2016, Reed served as the first SF Jazz Poet Laureate from
SF JAZZ, the leading non-profit jazz organization on the West Coast. His poem "Just Rollin' Along", about the 1934 encounter between
Bonnie and Clyde and Oakland Blues artist
L. C. Good Rockin' Robinson, is included in
The Best American Poetry 2019. == Influences ==