Courtesans of Flounder Hill

Ishmael Hope

Ishmael Reed Publishing Company

With this publication of the novel “King Comus,” William Demby caps his already great literary achievements as the author of the now classic novels “Beetlecreek (1950),” “The Catacombs (1965),” and “Love Story Black (1978).” The product of twenty years of literary labor, “King Comus” was completed in 2007, and remained in manuscript form at the time Demby died in 2013. The last of the Black novelists who served in World War II, Demby was honored with the Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006. In “King Comus,” William Demby employs a cinematic-like style to track the paths of an escaped slave, two African American World War II servicemen, their white commanding officer and a black female gospel singer as they converge in a time-bending tale of survival and kinship. Narrated in part by his descendant, Tillman, a World War II GI serving in Italy, it follows the escaped slave and master musician, known as King Comus, on his extraordinary journey to freedom. Tillman relates his family’s history to a fellow serviceman named D., whose role in this mysterious tale includes some parallels to the author’s life story. When the plotline turns to the twenty-first century, these veterans unite in Italy with their white commanding officer, Joe Stabat, to stage a colossal global gospel summit in Rome, featuring the gospel star, Little Antioch. “King Comus” weaves elements of the neo-slave narrative and Afrofuturism into a panoramic vision encompassing the forces of empire, race, gender, and religion. It may well come to be considered Demby’s masterpiece.

King Comus

William Demby

Rock Piles Along the Eddy is the second poetry collection by poet, storyteller, actor and playwright Ishmael Hope. Rock Piles Along the Eddy elevates Indigenous thought and lifeways, intermingling the landscapes of personal experience, Indigenous cultural knowledge, stories, familial connections and the spirit and knowledge of land and sea. Indigenous thought threads through Rock Piles Along the Eddy, with its guiding light the wisdom often shared by Hope's Elders: there is a spirit in everything. As current Alaska Writer Laureate, Ernestine Hayes, comments on this collection, "Ishmael Hope's poetry resonates with love of ancestral place and love of life. I walked with him along the beaches and rivers he loves, listened to the stories he remembers, tasted the wine, heard the ancient whispers, felt the nettles and moss. 'Everything is food, everything feeds,' he tells us, and his poems bear out his promise. He has given us words that nourish." Ishmael Hope is an Inupiaq and Tlingit poet, storyteller, actor and playwright living in Juneau, Alaska with his wife Lily Hope and four children. Notable recent projects include his first poetry collection, Courtesans of Flounder Hill; serving as the lead writer for Kisima Ingitchuna: Never Alone, produced by the Cook Inlet Tribal Council and E-Line Media; and co-directing, with Scott Burton, a documentary on Tlingit art produced by KTOO Public Media.

Rock Piles Along the Eddy

Poetry. African American Studies. The new work by well-known writer and scholar, Calvin Hernton, is published in a handsome, saddle-stapled edition with a glossy cover. Calvin Hernton is a poet, writer, social scientist and Professor of African American Studies at Oberlin College. Among his nine books are Sex and Racism in America (in print for over 30 years) and the poetry collection Medicine Man.

The Red Crab Gang and Black River Poems

Literature & Fiction

Hernton, Calvin

Poetry

Poetry. African-Studies. With the publication of 25 NEW NIGERIAN POETS, Ishmael Reed's publishing company continues its commitment to new and politically relevant writers. In the introduction, Toyin Adewale writes that the literary renaissance joyfully announced by Harry Garuba in his introduction to VOICES FROM THE FRINGE, the anthology of 100 young Nigherian poets published in 1988 is today non-existent. The intervening decade between 1999 and now was burdened by the military regimes of General Ibrahim Babangida and General Sanni Abacha. The decade beheld the betrayal of our political will, the annulment of the June 1993 elections, the murder of human rights and political activists including the former president of the Association of Nigerian Authors, Ken Saro Wiwa. Nevertheless, because lack of publishing avenues is one of the starkest results of this turmoil, Adewale finds a sliver of hope in the existence of this very book, which she calls an appetizer to further reading in Nigerian lit

25 New Nigerian Poets

Poetry. African American Studies. This new collection by poet, essayist, and professor Kathryn Waddell Takara reflects her travels as a performance poet in Africa, Europe, Central America, Tahiti and China. Born and raised in Tuskegee, Alabama, Takara is currently Assistant Professor at the University of Hawai'i at Monoa in the Ethnic Studies Department. "What makes us able to come together is that we all have a critique - we all bear witness to the social, economic, and the political - not just the tree, not just grandma - but the context"-Kathryn Waddell Takara.

New and Collected Poems

Takara, Kathryn Waddell

Poetry. African American. In this latest chapbook from one of the 20th century's most vital and revolutionary authors, poems are set visually on canvas-like pages, blurring the line between visual and poetic art. "Whether it's politics, music, literature, or the origins of language, there is always a historical and time/place/condition reference that will always try to explain why I was saying both how and for what"--Amiri Baraka.

UN POCO LOW COUP

Baraka, Amiri

Arts & Photography

The Plague Edition of Konch Magazine

Ishmael Reed

16 Short Stories by Nigerian Women Writers, the third anthology of Nigerian writing to be edited by Toyin Adewale-Gabriel, makes a most important addition to Ishmael Reed Publishing Company's book list. The founder of the association of Women Writers of Nigeria, Toyin Adewale-Gabriel's anthologies have been almost unique in promoting the voices of Nigerian women writers in the literary marketplace. Her second collection, 25 New Nigerian Poets, was published in 2000 by Ishmael Reed Publishing Company to wide acclaim, becoming a best seller on Small Press Distribution's list. The Village Voice Literary Supplement (02/2001) cited the poems as "a heartening response to the silence of the recent past," and the Washington Post (03/10/2002) praised the collection as a "unique experience with pure language magic."  Ms. Adewale-Gabriel says the stories in 16 Short Stories by Nigerian Women Writers "...have a passion for deep down things, their alluring, humorous or tragic narration revealing the heart of what is the matter with us as a people. They own a humane currency that buys into urgent social and political issues, HIV/AIDS, women abuse, child abuse, adolescent sexuality, infertility, women's participation in democratic politics, levirate, cultural discriminations against the girl child and the 'Get Rich Quick' syndrome, so seductive for many Nigerians because of the growing poverty of our people."  16 Short Stories by Nigerian Women Writers includes new and established writers. They are: Akachi Adimore-Ezeigbo; Angela Amalonye Nwosu; Sefi Atta; Unoma Azuah; Lynn Chukura; Chinyere Eze-Mbulo; Fatima Usara Hassan-Tom; Biodun Idowu; Karen King-Aribisala; Binta Salma Mohammed; Ifeoma Okoye; Bumni Oyinsan; Ngoizi Razak-Soyebi; Lola Shoneyin; Chika Uniqwe; and Toyin Adewale-Gabrie

Short Stories by 16 Nigerian Women (Ishmael Reed Publishing Company, 2005)

Adewale-Gabriel, Toyin

In ¿JERRI, A Black Woman¿s Life In the Media,¿ Jerri Lange has written a personal, candid revelation of the situation of a black woman in the early days of media. She reminds us of a time when sheroes like Ms. Lange challenged powerful institutions, no matter the consequences. Armed with her father¿s admonition to not allow anyone to interfere with her dreams, author Jerri Lange set out on a life¿s journey that would take her to the pinnacle of San Francisco¿s media and political power. A single mother, Ms. Lange accomplished this while raising three distinguished sons, including Michael, a director, producer and Malcolm X delineator, and Ted, a regular on the television series ¿Love Boat.¿ Ms. Lange¿s journalistic career began at the San Francisco Chronicle, where she worked along side such luminaries as Art Hoppe, Charles McCabe and Count Marco, and her mentor, Scott Newhall. She continued with tours at stations KEMO, KBHK, KGO and KQED Television. The dream ended when Ms. Lange delivered her famous speech, ¿Blacks In Broadcasting,¿ in which she criticized the negative images of blacks in the media. After this speech she found the industry that had formerly welcomed her as the token pioneering African-American newswoman and television host, began to give her the cold shoulder. She was eventually, in her words, `black balled.¿ But if some members of the segregated San Francisco media thought that they had defeated Jerri Lange, they underestimated the resiliency of Laura and Turner Wilson¿s daughter. Ms. Lange began to tour the world, which provided her with the opportunity to draw revealing portraits of a dictator¿s wife, Arnold Toynbee, and others. Along the way she was feted by members of the British aristocracy and was an invited guest to a king¿s wedding. Ms. Lange also gives the reader revealing portraits of Malcolm X, Shirley MacLaine, Sammy Davis, Jr. and Daisaku Ikeda. She continued her career at KHET, a public television station in Hawaii. With African American faces disappearing from television news rooms, and the media establishment having abandoned their goal of diversifying the industry by the year two thousand, a challenge made by the late Robert Maynard, Ms. Lange¿s effort as a pioneer African-American news woman is especially timely.

J E R R I

Biographies & Memoirs

Boadiba

Jerri Lange, Lange

Lange, Jerri

Community & Culture

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Books by Ishmael Reed Publishing Company