Black Surrealist. Poet. Artist. Jazz trumpeter. Member of the Beat Generation. Life-long wanderer. Pan-Africanist. Black Power agitator. Author of his own “poem-life.” 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. 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. Drawing on interviews and deep archival research, this critical literary biography explores Joans’s life as told through these relationships and through his remarkable creative output, which often explored his life and its connections to wider aesthetic and political experiences of the 20th century.
