Black California Gold

Wendy M Thompson

Black California Gold
Format
Paperback
Publisher
Bucknell University Press
Published
11 March 2025
Pages
70
ISBN
9781684485505

Black California Gold

Wendy M Thompson

Black California Gold takes the temperature of black life in the California Bay Area, exploring the depths of race, family, migration, and identity amid a landscape of urban redevelopment, advanced gentrification, and black displacement across the region. Moving through time and space, this debut poetry collection explores popular intersections and lesser-known side streets, moving through private scenes and personal memories to present a fragmented meditation on girlhood, identity, natural landscape, class, familial belonging, and violence by a mixed-race, Black Chinese daughter of Oakland. Challenging the mythology of California as the great melting pot, Black California Gold seeks to map out the landscape of a region within a region whose edges continue to fall away, revealing fault lines upon which current black Bay Area communities continue to build, celebrate, create, age, grieve, and die. Black California Gold speaks to the legacies of black migration west, highlighting the struggle of holding onto and losing home and family amid the violence of dispossession and black undoing. [I have not released the descriptions to Eloquence because this is a trade title and the descriptions will be freelanced. P.D.]

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