Ishmael Reed was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the son of Bennie and Thelma Coleman Reed. At age four he moved with his mother to Buffalo, New York, where later he attended the University of Buffalo (now the State University of New York at Buffalo) between 1956 and 1960. He married, but later divorced, Priscilla Rose, and he has a daughter, Timothy Brett. He presently lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, the choreographer Carla Blank.

In New York City during the early 1960s he started writing "visionary poetry" and associated with writers in the Umbra Workshop, "the institution," Reed says, "which began the current inflorescence of 'Black Poetry' as well as many other recent Afro-American styles of writing." In 1965 he cofounded the East Village Other, an early example of the "New Journalism" that incorporated the work of artists and writers into "collage newspapers."

After leaving New York in 1967, Reed settled...