*Ted Joans was born on July 4, 1928 on a riverboat in Cairo, Illinois. His father, a riverboat entertainer, put him off the boat in Memphis at age twelve and gave him a trumpet. He is a painter, a trumpeter, and a jazz poet. His jazz poems are collected in a book called “Black Pow-Wow.” He earned a degree in Fine Arts from Indiana University, and in 1951 joined “the Bohemia of Greenwich Village, USA.” He has since recited his poems in coffeehouses in New York and in the middle of Saraha Desert to bookstores such as Recollection Used Books in Seattle. He has lived in Harlem, New York, Bloomington, Indiana, Haarlem, the Netherlands, and even Timbuktu. He presently resides in Seattle.
His books include:
• Funky Jazz Poems
• Beat Poems
• All of T.J. and No More
• The Truth
• The Hipsters (a book of collages)
• Afrodisia
• A Black Pow Wow of Jazz Poems
• Double Trouble