Editors: Wendy Tronrud & Ammiel Alcalay
Part I: 58 pages, softcover, saddle-stitch binding
Part II: 60 pages, softcover, saddle-stitch binding
Ted Joans: Poet Painter / Former Villager Now / World Traveller, co-edited by Wendy Tronrud and Ammiel Alcalay, presents many archival texts by Joans that have never been published before, accompanied by photographs of Joans with a remarkable array of his friends, from James Baldwin and Archie Shepp to Anais Nin and Stokely Carmichael. Texts in this two chapbook selection include excerpts from one of Joans’ major but virtually unknown projects, a guidebook to Africa, as well as a selection of writings on music, surrealism, and the inimitable 1965 “Negative Cowboy.”
Author biography:
TED JOANS (1928-2003) was born in Cairo, Illinois, to parents who worked the riverboats on the Ohio and Mississippi. Trained as a visual artist and musician, Joans moved to New York City in 1951 to further immerse himself in the culture of art and jazz, soon becoming an essential figure in the Beat movement. Unable to abide the unyielding specter of US racism, he moved to Europe but, unlike many other black ex-pats, he continued his journey into Africa and lived most of his later life between Europe and Africa. While Ted Joans is a legendary figure known to many, much of his work is either out-of-print or remains in the archive. Some of his works include All of Ted Joans and No More (1961), Black Pow-Wow Jazz Poems (1969), Afrodisia (1970), and Teducation: Selected Poems 1949-1999 (1999).
Selected Archives:
- Ted Joans Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA
- Laurated Archive
