Honoring his experience of first achieving national publication of his poetry in anthologies edited by the senior writers Langston Hughes and Walter Lowenfels, as a result of his introducing Lucille Clifton's poetry to Langston Hughes, Reed was responsible for her first national recognition in Hughes' anthology The Poetry of the Negro (1967).[56]
Reed has continued to champion the work of other contemporary writers, by founding and serving as editor and publisher of various small presses and journals since the early 1970s. These include Yardbird Reader (which he edited from 1972 to 1976), and Reed, Cannon and Johnson Communications, an independent publishing house begun with Steve Cannon and Joe Johnson that focused on multicultural literature in the 1970s.[57][58] Reed's current publishing imprint is Ishmael Reed Publishing Company, and his online literary publication, Konch Magazine, features an international mix of poetry, essays and fiction.[59]
Among the writers first published by Reed when they were students in his writing workshops are Terry McMillan, Mona Simpson, Mitch Berman, Kathryn Trueblood, Danny Romero, Fae Myenne Ng, Brynn Saito, Mandy Kahn, and John Keene.
Reed is one of the producers of The Domestic Crusaders, a two-act play about Muslim Pakistani Americans written by his former student, Wajahat Ali.[60] Its first act was performed at the Kennedy Center's Millennium Hall in Washington, D.C., on November 14, 2010, and remains archived on their website.
Critics have also pointed to Reed's influence on writers Percival Everett, Colson Whitehead, Victor LaValle and Paul Beatty. In Chris Jackson's interview of Reed in the Fall 2016 edition of The Paris Review,[61] Reed discusses many literary influences, including Dante, the Celtic Revival poets, James Baldwin, George Schuyler, Nathanael West, Bob Kaufman, and Charles Wright. Reed said in a 2011 interview with Parul Sehgal: "My work holds up the mirror to hypocrisy, which puts me in a tradition of American writing that reaches back to Nathaniel Hawthorne."[62] Reed has also been quoted as saying: "So this is what we want: to sabotage history. They won't know whether we're serious or whether we are writing fiction ... Always keep them guessing."[63]
When discussing influences on his writing style in Writin’ is Fightin’ he attributed much of it to the warrior tradition he feels is inherent in African and African-American culture. Similar contemporary authors that Reed insists deny victim literature with a centralized black male villain are Amiri Baraka and Ed Bullins.
Looking forward in his writing Reed has stated that he wants to sustain Western values but mix them up a little bit to express a sense of multi-culturalism that represents more than just the African-American voice. Published in 1993 the novel, Japanese by Spring, was Reed's first trilingual text. The novel used English, Japanese, and Yoruba to better represent his ideas of a more realistic American multi-culturalism.
Conjugating Hindi was deeply compelled by his ideas of depicting a unification of multiple cultures. In this novel Reed explores the congruencies and differences of African-American and South Asian American cultures though political discourse posed by white neo-conservative Americans toward both ethnicities. As described in the Los Angeles Review of Books, "it is brilliant — the same sort of experimental brilliance observable in the fiction of Thomas Pynchon or the cut-up technique of William S. Burroughs — and more accessible. ...Conjugating Hindi is a firebrand’s novel, the crackling, overflowing, pugnacious novel of someone who doesn't care about genre boundaries any more than he cares about historical boundaries, but who does care deeply about innovating."[64]
