<DIV><p>&ldquo;Tennessee Reed is a brand new star in the galaxy of our spirit&mdash;shining for all of our people.&rdquo;&mdash;Simon Ortiz, author of <i>Telling and Showing Her</i></p><p>&ldquo;Reed writes with clarity, wit, and wonder&mdash;and with an open-hearted passion that disarms, refreshes, and delights.&rdquo;&mdash;Al Young, author of <i>Something About the Blues</i></p><p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m not like them,&rdquo; Tennessee Reed would tell her teachers to get them to see that the approach they used for students with &ldquo;normal&rdquo; brains didn&rsquo;t always work for her. As it turned out, she was different in quite a few other ways as well, including the great reserves of courage she could call upon to fight an educational system that often defined her disabilities as laziness or stupidity.</p><p>The daughter of writer/choreographer Carla Blank and novelist Ishmael Reed, Tennessee was diagnosed at an early age with several language-based learning disorders. The bottom line, the experts agreed, was that she would never read or write. Within a few years, however, she published her first book of poetry. By the time she was a teenager, she was writing the text for Meredith Monk performances and traveling the world to read her poems.</p><p><i>Spell Albuquerque </i>is an inspiring memoir of one woman&rsquo;s struggle to overcome racism and institutional authority and to achieve what everyone said was impossible.</p><p><b>Tennessee Reed </b>is the author of five books of poetry, including <i>City Beautiful</i>, <i>Airborne</i>, and <i>Electric Chocolate</i>. She is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, and has a master&rsquo;s degree from Mills College.</p></DIV>