About me
Wendy M. Thompson is a poet, writer, and scholar who hails from Oakland, California. Her debut poetry collection Black California Gold maps out life in the Bay Area during the 1980s and 1990s and was a finalist for the 2025 Martin Cruz Smith Award: Emerging Diverse Voices prize. She has a forthcoming scholarly book, Chasing the Sun: Staging Black Life, Belonging, and Displacement in California’s Bay Area, that looks at the cultural and performative worlds of black migrants and their descendants who staged mobility, home, and refusal during Second Great Migration into the contemporary era. She previously wrote and performed an original poem for the Suzanne Jackson: What is Love retrospective at SFMOMA and contributed an essay in the catalog for the Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California exhibit at BAMPFA. She is an Associate Professor of African American Studies at San José State University.
