ABOUT THIS BOOK

For numerous migrants who ventured westward in the twentieth century in search of greater opportunities, the glitter of California often proved to be mere fool’s gold—promising easy riches but frequently resulting in dispossession and displacement. Poet Wendy M. Thompson is descended from two of these migrant waves—post-1965 Chinese immigrants and Black southerners of the Second Great Migration—whose presence has permanently transformed the region.

In this arresting debut poetry collection, Thompson traces the past and present of California’s Bay Area, exploring themes of family, migration, girlhood, and identity against a backdrop of urban redevelopment, advanced gentrification, and the erasure of Black communities. Traveling down both familiar highways and obscure side streets, her poems map a region where race, class, and language are just some of the fault lines that divide communities and produce periodic tremors of violence and resistance.

Confronting assimilationist myths of the American Dream, Black California Gold depicts a setting that is less a melting pot than a smelting pot, subjecting different ethnic groups to searing trials and extreme pressures that threaten to break them down entirely. Yet, it also celebrates the Black residents of the Bay Area who have struggled to sustain home and hope amid increasingly desperate conditions.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

WENDY M. THOMPSON is an Oakland native whose creative work has most recently appeared in Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, Juked, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. She is an associate professor of African American studies at San José State University.

REVIEWS

"Thompson's beautiful and insightful Black California Gold offers an archive of the less understood and sparsely engaged history of Black and Asian California through the lens of self-making, labor, and rights. What makes this wildly interdisciplinary work unique is its attention to the depth of feeling experienced at this nexus—where the stakes and wounds are—and where they are bound to linger for generations."— Bettina Judd, author of Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought

"Black California Gold crafts a poetic counternarrative, one enriched by scholarly critique of the state and its violences, richly layered histories of black migration, and personal sensemaking at the altar of love, grief, and healing. Thompson invites us into a new black, poetic cartography, one that extends from the earth into the skies in its content; it is alive with poetic experimentation and risk. If you have ever wondered where the black people are in California, this book sings us—with Prince, no less—through history, through our survival into thriving, into the stars and back again!"— Raina León, author of black god mother this body

"Thompson's way with words cuts to the quick. . . . Each new perspective, including Thompson's nuanced, contextualized, and important work, deepens our understanding of the human accounting of what it's like to be othered, brutalized, and ignored in American life and history. . . . Work from poets of witness builds upon each other, each voice a necessary action taken against a shadowy tide."

— The Racket

TABLE OF CONTENTS

county maps