An uncompromising, challenging and complicated voice, Ishmael Reed is widely considered one of today's preeminent African American literary figures. Consistently inventive and provocative, Reed?s career spans over four decades and has been recognized with numerous awards including the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Award for Fiction, the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the American Civil Liberties Award, and the Pushcart Prize. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1998.
"Ishmael Reed . . . will be recalled at least in part for his self-willed expulsion from the literary tradition that he parodies, for his fierce political and literary individuality, and for his skill as an archer of satire. Despite the large tasks that Reed has set for his project as a writer, he achieved the most difficult goal of all?the registering of a literary voice at once black and American, yet always uniquely his own."
Henry Louis Gates

Hosted by: Department of English, Carr Visiting Writers Series

In conjunction with: College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Department of Anthropology, Department of History, Department of Philosophy, Department of Sociology, Department of Speech Communication, Afro-American Studies and Research Program, Center for African Studies, Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, Program for the Study of Religion, Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, African-American Cultural Program