Twin of Blackness

Clifford Thompson is the author of What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man's Blues (2019), which Time magazine named as one of the "most anticipated books" of the season, and which NPR called "captivating." He is the author and illustrator of the graphic novel Big Man and the Little Men, which is "slim in size and substantial in impact," in the words of the Times Literary Supplement. Thompson 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). 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, Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University, Queens College, and New York University. Since 2015 he has been a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities. He lives in Brooklyn.​

"Twin of Blackness is a culturally important memoir that traces an artist’s evolution in the post–civil rights era, a literary odyssey that comes triumphantly to rest in a humanity that transcends small-spirited notions about race. Clifford Thompson is simply one of the wisest, warmest, and most trustworthy essayists writing today." —Charles Johnson "Clifford Thompson’s memoir, Twin of Blackness, rather sneaks up on its reader, disarming in its simplicity, as it provides warm and intimate details of lower-middle-class black life. There is a nervy, rich honesty here in this coming-of-age self-portrait whose complexity grows subtly. Here is a tale that is touching, amiable, yet unsentimental." —Gerald Early