Reed withdrew from college in his junior year, partly for financial reasons, but mainly because he felt he needed a new atmosphere to support his writing and music.

[12]Among writers from the Harlem Renaissance for whose work Reed has expressed admiration are Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, George Schuyler, Bruce Nugent, Countee Cullen, Rudolph Fisher and Arna Bontemps.

Reed was also a member of the Umbra Writers Workshop (he attended his first Umbra meeting in Spring 1963, with others present including Lorenzo Thomas, Askia Touré, Charles Patterson, David Henderson, Albert Haynes, and Calvin Hernton),[14] some of whose members helped establish the Black Arts Movement and promoted a Black Aesthetic.

While working on his novel Flight to Canada (1976), he coined the term "Neo-Slave narrative", which he used in 1984 in "A Conversation with Ishmael Reed" by Reginald Martin.

[21] To commemorate its 50 years in print, in 2022, Scribner's released a new edition of his third novel, Mumbo Jumbo, cited by Harold Bloom as one of 500 great books of the Western canon.

His twelfth and newest play, The Shine Challenge 2024, premiered as a virtual staged reading February 23 through April 15, 2024, sponsored by the Nuyorican Poets Cafe.

[33] Reed has also edited 15 anthologies, including the recent Bigotry on Broadway, co-edited with his wife, Carla Blank, and published by Baraka Books of Montreal in September 2021.

Reed's Introduction to The Minister Primarily, a previously unpublished novel by the late John Oliver Killens, was published by Amistad in July 2021.

In 2023, Forewords by Reed were included in Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton,[35] Library of America's special publication of John A. Williams' novel, The Man Who Cried I Am,[36] and photographer Awol Erizku's Mystic Parallax.

Reed's novels, poetry and essays have been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, Japanese, Hebrew, Hungarian, Dutch, Korean, Chinese and Czech, among other languages.

[44] His poem, "Just Rollin' Along," about the 1934 encounter between Bonnie and Clyde and Oakland Blues artist L. C. Good Rockin' Robinson, is included in The Best American Poetry 2019.

In 1997, he received the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Award, and established a three-year collaboration between the non-profit and Oakland-based Second Start Literacy Project in 1998.

[48][49] In 1999, he received a Fred Cody Award from the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association, and was inducted into Chicago State University's National Literary Hall of Fame of Writers of African Descent.

[56] Reed has continued to champion the work of other contemporary writers, by founding and serving as editor and publisher of various small presses and journals since the early 1970s.

[59] Among the writers first published by Reed when they were students in his writing workshops are Terry McMillan, Mona Simpson, Mitch Berman, Kathryn Trueblood, Danny Romero, Fae Myenne Ng, Brynn Saito, Mandy Kahn, and John Keene.

Reed is one of the producers of The Domestic Crusaders, a two-act play about Muslim Pakistani Americans written by his former student, Wajahat Ali.

Reed said in a 2011 interview with Parul Sehgal: "My work holds up the mirror to hypocrisy, which puts me in a tradition of American writing that reaches back to Nathaniel Hawthorne.

"[63] When discussing influences on his writing style in Writin’ is Fightin’ he attributed much of it to the warrior tradition he feels is inherent in African and African-American culture.

Similar contemporary authors that Reed insists deny victim literature with a centralized black male villain are Amiri Baraka and Ed Bullins.

Looking forward in his writing Reed has stated that he wants to sustain Western values but mix them up a little bit to express a sense of multi-culturalism that represents more than just the African-American voice.

As described in the Los Angeles Review of Books, "it is brilliant — the same sort of experimental brilliance observable in the fiction of Thomas Pynchon or the cut-up technique of William S. Burroughs — and more accessible.

"[64] Ishmael Reed's texts and lyrics have been performed, composed or set to music by Albert Ayler, David Murray, Allen Toussaint, Carman Moore, Taj Mahal, Olu Dara, Lester Bowie, Carla Bley, Steve Swallow, Ravi Coltrane, Leo Nocentelli, Eddie Harris, Anthony Cox, Don Pullen, Billy Bang, Bobby Womack, Milton Cardona, Omar Sosa, Fernando Saunders, Yosvanni Terry, Jack Bruce, Little Jimmy Scott, Robert Jason, Alvin Youngblood Hart, Mary Wilson of the Supremes, Cassandra Wilson, Gregory Porter and others.

His piano playing was cited by Harper's Bazaar and Vogue as he accompanied a 2019 fashion show at the Serpentine Gallery in London, featuring the work of designer Grace Wales Bonner.

On September 11, 2011, in a Jazz à la Villette concert at the Grande Halle in Paris, the Red Bull Music Academy World Tour premiered three new songs with lyrics by Ishmael Reed, performed by Macy Gray, Tony Allen, members of The Roots, David Murray and his Big Band, Amp Fiddler and Fela!