Black California Gold Listening Session: Sonic Shifts and Poetic Soundings across the Black Bay Area.

Black California Gold Listening Session: Sonic Shifts and Poetic Soundings across the Black Bay Area.

Poet Wendy M. Thompson reads from her collection, Black California Gold, and engages in conversation with Dawn-Elissa Fischer.Poet Wendy M. Thompson's debut poetry collection, Black California Gold (Bucknell University Press, 2025) 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, there is sound and song between the lines in the poetic scenes laid out in this patchwork of a place, a mix of counties, cities, and suburbs that line the San Francisco Bay. Listening to a curated soundtrack that ranges across era and genre, Thompson engages with Dawn-Elissa Fischer, anthropologist and filmmaker, reflecting on what gospel and blues did for the migrant generation, for whom California became an extension of the South, and who laid the groundwork for the political and cultural transitions created and experienced by their descendants who would navigate changing Bay Area cities with funk, soul, and hip hop as a sonic response and guide.Using soundscapes as a thematic entrypoint, Thompson and Fischer discuss place and sound as sensorial markers, locating the Bay Area as a simultaneously globalized and localized region where black sound is root, mood, political call and response, and borrowed language, and shifting sounds of urbanity, suburban sprawl, and nature permeate what it means to call the Bay Area home. This talk will include a reading by the author. Wendy M. Thompson is an Oakland-based poet and Associate Professor of African American Studies at San José State University. For this reading, she will be joined in conversation by Dawn-Elissa Fischer, filmmaker and Professor of Anthropology at San Francisco State University. Free event; Thompson's book will be available for sale at the reading ($19.95, pb).  To reserve a seat or for more information, please call the bookshop at 415-586-3733.