Wendy M. Thompson
Wendy M. Thompson is a poet, writer, and scholar who hails from Oakland, California. Her debut poetry collection Black California Gold (Bucknell University Press, 2025) maps out life in the Bay Area during the 1980s and 1990s and was a finalist for the Martin Cruz Smith Award: Emerging Diverse Voices prize (2025 Golden Poppy Awards). Eternally interested in the black Bay Area, her forthcoming book Chasing the Sun: Staging Black Life, Belonging, and Displacement in California’s Bay Area looks at the cultural and performative worlds of black migrants and their descendants from the Second World War to the afterlife of the Second Great Migration. She teaches at San José State University where she is an Associate Professor of African American Studies.
