Temple University’s English Department Recognizes the 150th Year Since the Emancipation Proclamation & the 50th Year Since Dr. King’s March on Washington with a reading and reception honoring Ishmael Reed.

Author of over twenty titles including the acclaimed novel Mumbo Jumbo as well as essays, plays and poetry, Ishmael Reed is the winner of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, the renowned L.A. Times Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award. Founder of the Before Columbus Foundation, which promotes multicultural American writing, he has been nominated for a Pulitzer and finalist for two National Book Awards and is Professor Emeritus at the University of California – Berkeley. He also founded PEN Oakland, which issues the Josephine Miles Literary Awards and has been called “The Blue Collar PEN” by the New York Times. Reed’s most recent essay collection, Barack Obama and The Jim Crow Media: The Return Of The “Nigger Breakers,” was published in 2010. His tenth novel, Juice!, includes over twenty of his original cartoons. Forthcoming new works are The Fighter and the Writer: Two American Stories, a non-fiction work from Random House, and Brawls, a new book of essays.

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