Black California Gold

By 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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1684485517
• ISBN13: 9781684485512
• Release Date: March 2025
• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Length: 130 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.0" x 8.1"
• Age Range: 16 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 11 and higher