Person

Ishmael Reed

Related Excerpts

Jeffery Paul Chan, Frank Chin, Lawson Fusao Inada, Shawn Wong, and Chan’s daughter Jennifer.

The Asian-American Canon Breakers

Proudly embracing their role as outsiders, a group of writer-activists set out to create a cultural identity—and a literature—of their own.
Lin Manuel-Miranda, not in costume, and the cast of Hamilton, on stage.

In "The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda," Ishmael Reed Revives an Old Debate

If “Hamilton” is subversive, the mischievous Reed asks, what is it subverting?
Collage of Hamilton and Slam Frank the musical.

History Has Its Eyes on You

Slam Frank and musical theater’s Hamilton bind.
Illustration of a literary rejection letter.

There Is No Point in My Being Other Than Honest with You: On Toni Morrison’s Rejection Letters

Autopsies of a changing publishing industry; frustrations with readers' tastes; and sympathies for poets and authors drawn to commercially hopeless genres.
Henry Louis Gates Jr.

How Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Helped Remake the Literary Canon

The scholar has changed the way Black authors get read and the way Black history gets told.
The cast of "Hamilton" on stage.

Why We’ll Never Stop Arguing About Hamilton

Hamilton is an impossibly slippery text. The arguments over the show are part of what make it great.

Privatizing the Public City

Oakland’s lopsided boom.