Radical Poetry Reading with Ishmael Reed

Poet, novelist, essayist, and playwright Ishmael Reed grew up in working-class neighborhoods in Buffalo, New York. In addition to his writing career, he is a songwriter, television producer, publisher, editor, and founder of the Before Columbus Foundation, There City Cinema, and Konch magazine which he co-edits with Tennessee Reed. His most recent poetry collection Why the Black Hole Sings the Blues: Poems 2007–2020 was released by Dalkey Archive Press in November 2020, and his novel The Terrible Fours was released by Baraka Books in June 2021. His tenth and most recent play The Slave Who Loved Caviar received a virtual reading in March 2021, and will be mounted by Theater for the New City in December 2021. He is Distinguished Emeritus at University of California Berkeley.

Oakland-based poet, curator, and journalist Theo Konrad Auer’s writing has appeared in Konch magazine, Be About It, Black Renaissance Noire, Art Practical, Bay Area Generations, Stretcher, The Oakbook, Asspants, Swee(t)Art, Juxtapoz, Fecale Face, and HiFructose, among others. He is a cofounder of Oakland Art Murmur, a public art nonprofit organization showcasing Oakland’s arts and cultural production. He has performed at the Berkeley Art Museum and the San Francisco Jazz Center.

Haitian poet and translator, Boadiba is a teller of tall tales in the traditional Haitian style and known for combining original poetry and traditional and contemporary sacred songs of Haiti. She is the author of the poetry collection Under Burning White Sky (Ishmael Reed Publishing Company 2005), which was adapted into a one-woman show for the Live Oaks Theater in Berkeley. Five stories from her publication in process, Tales of Lust and Sorcery, can be found in Konch magazine and in Left Curve. She has been published widely, and anthologized in Open Gate and the Revolutionary Poets Brigade compilations, and has performed at the Museum of African Diaspora, the Poetry Archives at San Francisco State University, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and more.

Writer, playwright, and producer Dr. Kim McMillon is the editor of the anthology Black Fire—This Time, which will be published in December 2021 by Willow Books. She is also a contributor to the anthology Some Other Blues: New Perspectives on Amiri Baraka (Ohio University Press, 2021) released in February of this year. McMillion is the host of Bay Area Artbeat, and produced the Dillard University-Harvard Hutchins Center Black Arts Movement 2016 Conference, as well as Fifty Years On, the 2014 UC Merced Black Arts Movement Conference.

Writer Tennessee Reed is the author of seven poetry collections, a memoir, and a novel. She has read her work around the continental United States, Alaska, Hawaii, England, the Netherlands, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Israel, and Japan. She is the chairperson of PEN Oakland and managing editor of Konch Magazine. Her most recent poetry collection Califia Burning: Poems, 2012-2019 was released by Dalkey Archive Press in 2020.