Meet Award-Winning Author Zangba Thomson

I didn’t write Three Black Boys to explain Black boyhood.

I wrote it to sit with the parts that rarely get named—the silences, the contradictions, the quiet negotiations that shape who we become long before adulthood officially begins.

Storytelling, for me, has always been a way to examine identity without flattening it. I’m interested in what lives beneath the surface: the pressures we inherit, the expectations we navigate, and the ways culture, memory, and environment quietly inform our choices. My work explores these themes not as abstractions, but as lived experiences—

often unresolved, often uncomfortable, always human.

As an author, I approach fiction with the same discipline and curiosity that has shaped my work as a cultural critic and editor. I’m less concerned with spectacle than with truth—how it’s carried, how it’s hidden, and how it reveals itself over time. Three Black Boys follows three lives moving through different worlds, each shaped by circumstance, masculinity, and survival. At its core, the series is about what Black boys carry into adulthood, whether they are prepared to or not.

Beyond my work as a novelist, I am the founder and editor-in-chief of Bong Mines Entertainment, an independent media platform dedicated to spotlighting emerging artists and documenting music culture with clarity and intent. That work has deeply informed my writing. Engaging daily with artists, creators, and audiences has reinforced my belief that storytelling—whether through music, journalism, or fiction—has the power to preserve nuance in a world that often resists it.

Recognition for my work, including literary awards and community honors, has been meaningful, but it has never been the goal. What matters more is resonance: when a reader sees something familiar in the story, when a moment lingers longer than expected, when silence speaks as loudly as dialogue. That’s where the work lives for me—and where it continues.

On storytelling, identity, and the quiet negotiations of becoming