Posted on Wednesday, February 20, 2013 by Jim Norrena
Ishmael Reed is an internationally renowned, award-winning novelist, poet, playwright, and essayist with more than 25 published books and six plays to his credit.
He's also a visiting scholar in the MFA Program in Writing at California College of the Arts.
Recently, his article "Neo-Classical Republicanism" was published in the New York Times in the Opinion Pages section:
"During Tuesday’s State of the Union address, President Obama declared that 'Our housing market is healing, our stock market is rebounding and consumers, patients and homeowners enjoy stronger protections than ever before.'
Tell that to black Americans, who were hit harder than the rest of the country by the recession and are having a harder time recovering. That struggle is not a coincidence, or merely a result of past inequality. During the housing bubble, blacks were deliberately targeted for subprime loans: as Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said, the big banks committed 'systematic discrimination against blacks and Hispanics.'"
About Ishmael Reed
Reed also is a publisher, editor of numerous anthologies and magazines, television producer, radio and television commentator, teacher, and lecturer. In addition to his 26 years spent as a lecturer at UC Berkeley, Reed also taught at Harvard, Dartmouth, and Yale.
New and Collected Poems, 1964–2006 (Carroll & Graf, 2006) was recently released in paperback and New and Collected Poems, 1964–2007 (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2007) was listed by The New York Times Book Review as one of the four best books of poetry published in 2006. The latter title also received the California Gold Medal in Poetry by the Commonwealth Club in June 2007.
In 1998 he became the 23rd UC Berkeley faculty member to be awarded with the prestigious John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship award.