Malik Thompson

Malik Thompson head shot

Literature – Poetry


Washington, D.C.
July 2024, four weeks

Intimacy is a relational force that tends to be understood and interpreted in terms that flatten its intensity and complexity. Offering a corrective to these pallid interpretations, Malik Thompson’s work explores intimacy through the prisms of queerness, the surreal, monstrosity, the penumbral, and a spirituality stained with the Judeo-Christian tradition. Thompson is in search of a primal language—an endarkened language—to evoke the wildernesses of his own interior, in hopes that his poems will operate as portals that lead readers to their own interior wilds.

In addition to working on his poetry collection, Malik gave a reading of his work at Fair Trade Books on July 13th 2024.