Böcker av Clifford Thompson

"April Wells, a celebrated African-American memoirist and essayist, lands a writing assignment unlike any she has had before: covering the presidential campaign of the presumptive Democratic nominee, William Waters, for a high-profile magazine. Waters, a well-spoken progressive with lofty ideals of unity in diversity, faces the polar opposite in his Republican challenger, the anti-intellectual, narcissistic Lee Newsome, who seeks to gain power by sowing division. Ahead of the Democratic National Convention, to be held in April's hometown, Waters must also contend with a potential Achilles' heel: persistent rumors that he has cheated on his wife with young male staffers. At first excited about the assignment, April sometimes feels out of her depth and wonders why she was chosen instead of a veteran journalist"--

Winner of the 2012 Autumn House Nonfiction Prize, selected by Phillip Lopate.

His first memoir

An African-American writer''s concise, heartfelt take on the state of his nation, exploring the war between the values he has always held and the reality with which he is confronted in twenty-first-century America.In the tradition of James Baldwin''s The Fire Next Time and Ta-Nehisi Coates''s Between the World and Me comes Clifford Thompson''s What It Is. Thompson was raised to believe in treating every person of every color as an individual, and he decided as a young man that America, despite its history of racial oppression, was his home as much as anyone else''s. As a middle-aged, happily married father of biracial children, Thompson finds himself questioning his most deeply held convictions when the race-baiting Donald Trump ascends to the presidency—elected by whites, whom Thompson had refused to judge as a group, and who make up the majority in this country Thompson had called his own. In the grip of contradictory emotions, Thompson turns for guidance to the wisdom of writers he admires while knowing that the answers to his questions about America ultimately lie in America itself. Through interviews with a small but varied group of Americans he hears sharply divergent opinions about what is happening in the country while trying to find his own answers—conclusions based not on conventional wisdom or on what he would like to believe, but on what he sees.