This Book Discussion Roundtable focuses on Black California Gold (Bucknell University Press, 2025) by Wendy M. Thompson.

Poet and Associate Professor of African American Studies, Thompson is descended from two migrant waves who arrived in California in the twentieth century in search of greater opportunities: post-1965 Chinese immigrants from Southeast Asia and Black southerners of the Second Great Migration. Thompson’s mother is a Chinese immigrant from Burma/Myanmar, and her father is the son of Black Southern migrants.

In Black California Gold, Thompson traces the past and present of California’s Bay Area, exploring themes of interracial family, migration, girlhood, and identity against a backdrop of urban redevelopment, advanced gentrification, and the erasure of Black communities. Thompson’s arresting debut poetry collection maps 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, Thompson depicts a setting that is more a smelting pot than a melting pot, subjecting different ethnic groups to searing trials and extreme pressures. Yet, her poetry also celebrates the Black and multiracial Asian American residents of the Bay Area who have struggled to sustain home, family, and hope amid increasingly desperate conditions.

This Book Discussion Roundtable assembles scholars of Burma/Myanmar, the nation from which Thompson’s mother migrated, and multiracial Asian American scholars of Burmese descent to share their reflections of and responses to Black California Gold as a work that explores not only Black life in the Bay Area, but also overlapping layers of ethnicity, identity, race, and kinship within Burmese and Chinese diasporas in the United States.

In keeping with the conference theme, this Roundtable will examine how Thompson’s poetry testifies to historical trajectories that have brought migrants of different races in relation in northern California. Black California Gold not only traces how China, Burma/Myanmar, and the US mainland are bound together in Thompson’s embodied memories and multilingual narrative voice, but also eloquently explores global and historical processes of relation, racial capitalism, land, capital, racialization, settler colonialism, displacement, and the legacies and logics of white supremacy.