While polarization describes the current political and cultural climate in the United States, an alliance between Black, Hispanic, Asian American, Native American, Italian, Irish, and Jewish writers has held for 50 years. Ishmael Reed, writer, poet, playwright, and frequent contributor to Alta Journal, sits down with Alta editor and publisher Will Hearst to discuss this alliance and how it relates to his latest anthology, Blind Persistence: The History of the Before Columbus Foundation, an organization Reed founded nearly 50 years ago that operates on the premise that storytelling traditions existed thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans. Blind Persistence is the Before Columbus story as told by a host of leading American poets, novelists, and public intellectuals, including Wajahat Ali, Carolyn Forché, Joy Harjo, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Nancy Mercado, Margaret Porter Troupe, Shawn Wong, and more. Join Alta Live as we welcome Reed for an engaging, important, and especially timely conversation.
About the guest:
Ishmael Reed is the author of several collections of poetry, including New and Collected Poems 1964–2006, which won the Gold Medal in poetry at the California Book Awards; New and Collected Poems; Conjure: Selected Poems, 1963–1970, which was nominated for a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize; and Catechism of D Neoamerican HooDoo Church.
Reed has also written numerous novels, including Juice!; Mumbo Jumbo, which was nominated for a National Book Award; and The Free-Lance Pallbearers. Also a playwright and essayist, he has published a collection of his drama, The Plays, as well as several books of nonfiction, including The Complete Muhammad Ali.
Reed has founded and cofounded several small presses, journals, and organizations, including the Before Columbus Foundation, Ishmael Reed Publishing Company, PEN Oakland, Quilt magazine, and Yardbird Publishing Company. He has edited a number of anthologies, including From Totems to Hip-Hop: A Multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas, 1900–2002.
In 2012, he was named the first SF JAZZ Poet Laureate, and in 2008, he was honored as the Blues Songwriter of the Year from the West Coast Blues Hall of Fame. He has released numerous CDs of jazz and spoken word.
Reed received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1998. His numerous other honors and awards include the first International Alberto Dubito Award, an American Civil Liberties Award, a Guggenheim Foundation Award, and the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council. Until his retirement in 2005, he taught creative writing at the University of California at Berkeley for over 30 years. He lives in Oakland, California.
About the moderator:
Will Hearst is the editor and publisher of Alta Journal, which he founded in 2017. He is the board chair of Hearst Communications, one of the nation’s largest diversified media and information companies. Hearst is a grandson of company founder William Randolph Hearst. He is also a horseman and amateur pilot.•
