The Paris Review - Fall 2016

INTERVIEWER
Do you think that over those forty years those awards have had an effect in
terms of widening the range of books that get published and read?
REED
Absolutely. I mean, some of those people who’ve gotten awards, it’s helped
them get tenured, it’s given them shelf life. The American Book Awards is
competitive. As a matter of fact, the NEA ranked the American Book Awards
with the Pulitzers and the National Book Awards. The Washington Post asked
if the American Book Awards are the American League to the National Book
Awards’s National League. We have a little office and got a nice grant last year.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think it’s important that artists build their own bases of power?
REED
You just want to use up whatever equipment you can get. When I got that
MacArthur grant, I said, Everybody is going to benefit from this. So I
financed an opera, we called it a gospera, using a whole bunch of black people
in our community who were singers, artists. And then I financed plays where
black actors had challenging roles, not prostitutes or maids or anything, and
then I published books, including a couple of books from Nigeria. My plan
was to publish books from each country in Africa. That didn’t work out. But
I said thousands of people would benefit if I ever got one of those grants,
and, you know, thousands have.
What was the gospera?
INTERVIEWER
REED
I was commissioned by the San Francisco Opera to create something about
Christ’s arrest and the garden of Gethsemane. I took some liberties with the
story. I put Beelzebub in there and his character was bent on getting revenge
for an exorcism that Christ did. I had Lazarus complain about being brought
back from the dead and his mother complaining about having to take care
of him. And at the end, when the Romans ask Judas to identify Jesus, he
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