Overview

Jazz June: A Self-Portrait in Essays traces a life, not by recounting its major events but by going deep into its representative moments: the moments of wonder, hope, fear, uncertainty, humor, love, and epiphany that make up human experience. Along the way, as a son of a widowed mother, as a young man in the big city, as a husband and father, as an aging empty nester, and as an artist, the author discovers, with each new role, more of who he is. A lover of the arts, he offers creative reflections on literature, music, and film; a Black American whose life is informed but not defined by race, he embraces Black culture while remaining defiantly himself.

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9780820374642

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Reviews

Clifford Thompson has skillfully captured in words a distinct era of American history, the specific feel over time of two major cities (Washington and New York), an intimate glimpse of the complexity of race and masculinity, and the small details of family, love, ambition, fear, fatherhood, and aging that make up a life. It is a charming, quiet but powerful, well-crafted collection. -- Dinty W. Moore * author of Between Panic & Desire * Clifford Thompson is an essayist of the finest order. -- Jerald Walker * author of How to Make a Slave and Other Essays *

Author Information

CLIFFORD THOMPSON is a recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction whose essays and reviews have appeared in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Best American Essays, Times Literary Supplement, the 2024 Pushcart Prize Anthology, and more. His books include What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues, which Time magazine called one of the “most anticipated” books of the season, and the graphic novel Big Man and the Little Men, which he wrote and illustrated. Thompson teaches creative nonfiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College and the Vermont College of Fine Arts. A painter, he is a member of Blue Mountain Gallery in New York City.

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