“Black Surrealist is pure light illuminating the long night of blues and beats, humor and hunger, freedom and flight, myth and memory, love and sex, art and improvisation that is the poetic life of Ted Joans. Steven Belletto plumbed the Marvelous and produced a magnificent tapestry depicting not only Joans’s surrealist world but surrealism’s Black world. Ted Lives! Dig?”

―Robin D. G. Kelley, Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History, University of California, Los Angeles, and author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

“Black Surrealist: The Legend of Ted Joans is a fascinating and unconventional biography for an even more fascinating and unconventional artist. Expansive and thoroughly researched, this book will be a revelation for those of us who have known Joans primarily through his more widely available poetry collections and his most anthologized poems. Belletto may at times fall under the spell of his subject, but he nonetheless paints an engaging portrait in which we see Joans–the man of strong passions, politics, and contradictions, as well as the enigmatic, charismatic creator–with new clarity.”

―Evie Shockley, Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English, Rutgers University, and author of Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry

“Black Surrealist: The Legend of Ted Joans is a sorely needed critical biography of a poet and artist who made a profound impact on experimental movements on both sides of the Atlantic, from surrealism to the Black Arts Movement. Belletto’s eminently readable biography deftly situates Joans in the artistic, political, and literary contexts in which he lived, traversing the three continents and eight decades of Joans’s life. This study is especially well attuned to the plasticity of ‘facts’ in Joans’s life, brilliantly illuminating the relentless work of critical fabulation through which Joans fashioned his life and art alike.”

―Jonathan P. Eburne, Professor of Comparative Literature, English, and French and Francophone Studies, The Pennylvania State University, and author Surrealism and the Art of Crime