Clifford Thompson

Profile

Clifford Thompson is the author, most recently, of What It Is: Race, Family and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues, just out from Other Press and selected by Time magazine as “One of the Most Anticipated Books” of the fall, 2019 season. He received a Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction in 2013 for Love for Sale and Other Essays, published by Autumn House Press, which has also published his memoir, Twin of Blackness (2015).

Clifford’s personal essays, poems, and writings on books, film, jazz, and American identity have appeared in publications including The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Village Voice, The Times Literary Supplement, The Threepenny Review, The Georgia Review, Cineaste, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Best American Essays 2018. He is also the author of a novel, Signifying Nothing.

For over a dozen years he served as the editor of Current Biography, and he has taught creative nonfiction writing at the Bennington Writing Seminars, New York University, Columbia University, Queens College, and Sarah Lawrence College. He lives in Brooklyn. cliffordthompson.info »