Black Surrealist

Black Surrealist. Poet. Collage artist. Jazz trumpeter. Painter. Member of the Beat Generation. Life-long wanderer. Pan-Africanist. Black Power agitator. Author of his own “lifepoem.” Ted Joans (1928-2003) was all of these things, and yet none of these labels adequately capture the beauty and complexity of his life and work. A painter and musician who ultimately made his name as a writer, Joans defies easy categorization: known to students of Beat lore as bon vivant of the New York bohemian scene of the 1950s, he left this scene in 1961 to connect with his African roots and live in the remotest place he could think of: Timbuktu. For the rest of his life Joans moved between Timbuktu and Paris, Tangier and New York City, earning the moniker “tri-continental poet.” In the over 30 books of poetry and prose he published in his lifetime, Joans makes visible links among key artistic and political movements of the 20th century that are seldom discussed together: Surrealism, the Beat movement, Pan-Africanism, and Black Power. Joans’s connection to these movements is best understood through his relationships with a dazzling array of cultural and literary figures, from Beats Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, to Black writers Langston Hughes, Hart Leroy Bibbs, and Ishmael Reed, Surrealists André Breton, Charles Henri Ford, and Joyce Mansour, as well as countless other writers, artists, and musicians. Drawing on interviews and deep archival research, this critical literary biography explores Joans’s life and times as told through these relationships and through his remarkable output of creative work, which often explored his life and its connections to wider aesthetic and political experiences of the 20th century. Black Surrealist is the foundational book on Ted Joans, a singularly important 20th-century figure.