Description: "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"--
Brief description: Steven Belletto is Professor of English at Lafayette College, USA. He is author of The Beats: A Literary History (2020), No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives (2012), and editor of six books, including The Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac (2024), American Literature in Transition, 1950-1960 (2018) and The Cambridge Companion to the Beats (2017). He is an Editor of Contemporary Literature.
Review Quotes:
"Black Surrealist is the product of prodigious research. It offers 60 pages of footnotes, a 15-page bibliography, an extensive index ... plenty more. The dozens of illustrations, photographs and pictures of archival material provide a context for Joans' wild life and untamed art ... The folks at Bloomsbury are certainly to be applauded for putting together an extraordinary book." --Rock and the Beat Generation
"Whether Belletto's biography triggers future interest from publishes in Joans's extant writing, it should advance our consideration of him as an avant-garde artist, and justifiably so. Regardless, without doubt he admirably lived his life as art. Finally, Belletto takes care to note that Blackness was front and center in Joans's work. Black experience as attitude and outlook encompassed all he pursued: jazz, painting, poetry, sex, and global travel." --Rain Taxi Review of Books "Black Surrealist is pure light illuminating the long night of blues and beats, humor and hunger, freedom and flight, myth and memory, love and sex, art and improvisation that is the poetic life of Ted Joans. Steven Belletto plumbed the Marvelous and produced a magnificent tapestry depicting not only Joans's surrealist world but surrealism's Black world. Ted Lives! Dig?" --Robin D. G. Kelley, Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History, University of California, Los Angeles, USA, and author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination "Black Surrealist: The Legend of Ted Joans is a fascinating and unconventional biography for an even more fascinating and unconventional artist. Expansive and thoroughly researched, this book will be a revelation for those of us who have known Joans primarily through his more widely available poetry collections and his most anthologized poems. Belletto may at times fall under the spell of his subject, but he nonetheless paints an engaging portrait in which we see Joans-the man of strong passions, politics, and contradictions, as well as the enigmatic, charismatic creator-with new clarity." --Evie Shockley, Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English, Rutgers University, USA, and author of Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry "Black Surrealist: The Legend of Ted Joans is a sorely needed critical biography of a poet and artist who made a profound impact on experimental movements on both sides of the Atlantic, from surrealism to the Black Arts Movement. Belletto's eminently readable biography deftly situates Joans in the artistic, political, and literary contexts in which he lived, traversing the three continents and eight decades of Joans's life. This study is especially well attuned to the plasticity of 'facts' in Joans's life, brilliantly illuminating the relentless work of critical fabulation through which Joans fashioned his life and art alike." --Jonathan P. Eburne, Professor of Comparative Literature, English, and French and Francophone Studies, The Pennylvania State University, USA "One of the most significant books of Beat scholarship in recent years; Belletto's achievement in this biography will enlighten every serious reader of Beat literature." --Beat Scene