Carla Blank

Carla Blank is a writer, editor, and teacher who developed and taught a University of California, Berkeley, American Cultures lecture course, “Across Disciplines: 20th Century Art Forms, from 1994 to 1999 for the Center for Theater Arts (now called the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies) and the Interdisciplinary Studies Department. Teaching materials for the course led to the creation of a cross disciplinary timeline, "Rediscovering America: The Making of Multicultural America 1900-2000" (Three Rivers Press, an imprint of Random House, 2003), which highlights and reintegrates the complex contributions of women, African-and-native Americas, immigrants, radicals, and others normally cast to the margins of history books.

Carla Blank is coauthor, with Jody Roberts, of "Live OnStage!," an anthology of performing arts techniques and styles available in teacher resource and student editions (Dale Seymour Publications, a Pearson education imprint, 1997, 2001). North Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Idaho have adopted it for middle-school use statewide, and it is referenced in various Canadian and United States school district curriculum guidelines, including the Cambridge Public School Drama collective, developed with Harvard University's Office of the Arts, and the Yale-New Haven Teacher's Institute. Blank has also been a performer, director, and teacher of dance and theater for over thirty-five years, especially devoting her time to youth and community arts performance projects.

Currently, Carla Blank is co-editing an anthology with Ishmael Reed, titled "Powwow: 63 Writers Address the Fault Lines in the American Experience" (Da Capo Press, forthcoming 01/ 2009), and researching American women who entered the field of architecture in the nineteenth century. She also serves as editorial director of the Ishmael Reed Publishing Company, supervising its poetry and prose projects.

Carla Blank lives in Oakland, California, with her family of writers, Ishmael Reed and Tennessee Reed.