American
Tennessee Reed is a poet, memoirist, and fiction writer. The daughter of writer Ishmael Reed and writer/choreographer Carla Blank, she grew up in Oakland, California and received a BA from UC Berkeley (2001) and an MA from Mills College (2005). Diagnosed in early childhood with several language-based learning disorders, she surpassed expectations that she would never learn to read or write and published her first book of poetry when she was eleven. This became the first of four such collections appearing between 1988 and 2006. Reed has also written the memoir Spell Albuquerque: Memoirs of a Difficult Student and collaborated with composer Meredith Monk.