Ishmael Reed is the author of over twenty-five books including Mumbo Jumbo, The Last Days of Louisiana Red, Conjugating Hindi, and Juice!. He is also a publisher, television producer, songwriter, radio and television commentator, lecturer, and has long been devoted to exploring an alternative black aesthetic: the trickster tradition, or Neo-Hoodooism as he calls it. Founder of the Before Columbus Foundation, he taught at the University of California, Berkeley for over thirty years, retiring in 2005. In 2003, he received the coveted Otto Award for political theater.

"Swings with the poetry of slang, bop talk and a solo scat singer traversing 47 miles of barbed wire with a cobra snake for a necktie."—Rolling Stone“Ishmael Reed is a most talented humorist and possessor of a powerfully antic and lyric imagination. . . . Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down should be read as hard evidence of Reed’s uncommon talent.”—New Yorker“Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down is a full blown 'horse opera,’ a surrealistic spoof of the Western with Indian chiefs aboard helicopters, stagecoaches and closed circuit TVs, cavalry charges of taxis.”—New York Review of Books