Carla Blank

Carla Blank is an American writer, editor, educator, choreographer, and dramaturge. For more than four decades, she has been a performer, director, and teacher of dance and theater in the San Francisco Bay area, particularly involved with youth and community arts projects.

Blank is editorial director of the Ishmael Reed Publishing Company, and has also lectured at such educational institutions as the University of California–Berkeley, Dartmouth College, and the University of Washington. She has written and edited a number of books, including Rediscovering America: The Making of Multicultural America, 1900–2000 (2003), Pow-Wow: Charting the Fault Lines in the American Experience, Short Fiction, From Then to Now (2009), and Storming the Old Boys’ Citadel: Two Pioneer Women Architects of Nineteenth Century North America (2014).

Carla Blank grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and after attending Carnegie Mellon University transferred to and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College. Having begun her career as a performer while still a child, after graduation she moved to New York City where she studied ballet and made her debut there in 1963, participating in the avant-garde Judson Dance Theater workshops. She collaborated for many years with Suzushi Hanayagi (1928–2010), and in 2009, with director Robert Wilson and others put on a multidisciplinary live performance portrait of Hanayagi entitled KOOL, Dancing in My Mind, which had its premiere at New York City's Guggenheim Museum.

Blank has been involved with developing The Domestic Crusaders, Wajahat Ali's play about three generations of a Pakistani-American family in the wake of 9/11, since its inception, directing its Off-Broadway debut, on September 11, 2009, at the Nuyorican Poets Café.

In May 2015, Blank directed a production of Ishmael Reed's play Mother Hubbard in Xiangtan, China, and in September 2015 she directed News From Fukushima, by Yuri Kageyama, at La Mama Café Theater in New York.

Blank has taught Performance Art at Dartmouth College, Harvard's Office of the Arts, and has lectured on 20th-century art history at University of California, Berkeley's Department of Dramatic Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies.

She has written or been the editor of several books, including in 2003 Rediscovering America: The Making of Multicultural America, which "explores the lost history of America, highlighting and reintegrating the complex contributions of women, African, Asian, Hispanic, and Native Americans, immigrants, artists, renegades, rebels, rogues, and others normally cast to the margins of history books, but without whom there is no honest accounting of American history." Among her other published titles are Storming the Old Boys' Citadel: Two Pioneer Women Architects of Nineteenth Century North (Baraka Books, 2014), co-authored with architectural historian Tania Martin, which chronicles the careers of Louise Blanchard Bethune and Mother Joseph du Sacré-Coeur – a work about which The Montreal Review of Books said: "Books like this one are vital in highlighting what our history notes have left out. They remind us to redefine our views and question our records. If we need to redefine the history of architecture today, let it include women."

Anthologies that Blank has co-edited with Ishael Reed include PowWow: Charting the Fault Lines in the American Experience, Short Fiction, From Then to Now (2009), described by the Los Angeles Times as "big, diverse, messy, all over the place -- just like American literature itself." According to Publishers Weekly, it is "a captivating, multifarious look at the American experience through its short fiction", while January Magazine called it "an important book ... a collection intended to mark our consciousness and our hearts."

Over the years she has been a contributor to such publications as CounterPunch, El País, The Green Magazine, Hungry Mind Review, The Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle and Konch Magazine.

Blank has been married since 1970 to Ishmael Reed, whom she met in 1965. She has worked with Reed on a range of projects and books, in addition to her independent career. With Reed in the roles of jazz pianist and bandleader, she plays violin in the Ishmael Reed Quintet, having begun studying the violin as a child, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with Mihail Stolarevsky, making her recording debut on the CD For All We Know. She lives in Oakland, California, with her husband and their daughter, Tennessee Reed.

Non-fiction

• Rediscovering America: The Making of Multicultural America, 1900–2000, Three Rivers Press (an imprint of Random House), 2003, ISBN 0-609-80784-6.
• With Tania Martin, Storming the Old Boys’ Citadel: Two Pioneer Women Architects of Nineteenth Century North America, Baraka Books, 2014, ISBN 978-1771860130.

As contributing editor

• With Ishmael Reed, Califia, The California Poetry, Yardbird Publishing Company, 1979, ISBN 978-0931676031.
• With Ishmael Reed, MultiAmerica, Essays on Cultural Wars and Cultural Peace, Viking, 1997 ISBN 978-0670867530.
• With Ishmael Reed, From Totems to Hip-Hop: A Multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas, 1900–2002, Thunder's Mouth Press, 2003. ISBN 978-1560255000

As editor

• With Jody Roberts, Live On Stage!, Dale Seymour Publications, 1996, 2000, ISBN 978-1572323742

• With Ishmael Reed, Pow-Wow: Charting the Fault Lines in the American Experience, Short Fiction, From Then to Now, Da Capo Press, 2009, ISBN 978-1-56858-342-6.