Glenn Thompson (publisher)
| Glenn Thompson | |
|---|---|
| Born |
September 24, 1940 Harlem, New York City, New York, United States of America |
| Died | September 7, 2001 (aged 60) London, UK |
| Nationality | American |
| Area(s) | Editor, Publisher |
|
Notable works
|
Centerprise Writers and Readers Cooperative |
| Spouse(s) | Margaret Gosley Sian Williams |
| Children | Shoshannah, Benjamin, Elisha |
Glenn Thompson (September 24, 1940 - September 7, 2001) was an American book publisher and activist. Born in Harlem, New York, he moved in 1968 to England, began a community-based bookshop called Centerprise in Hackney, East London, and went on to co-found in 1976 the Writers and Readers Cooperative, best known as publisher of the ...For Beginners series of documentary graphic nonfiction books.
Glenn Thompson was born on September 24, 1940, to Clara Belle and George Joseph Thompson, in Harlem, New York. Glenn was raised in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. His mother died when he was 13 and shortly thereafter his truck-driver father left the family. Glenn and his younger brother Dennis Thompson (born 1942) were picked up by the welfare department and sent to a children's shelter. After only a couple of weeks Glenn was moved to another location and the brothers were separated.
Thompson did not learn to read until the age of 12, and left school when he was just turning 14, but he continued to educate himself by reading voraciously. He signed on to work on a freighter when he was 20, thus buying passage to North Africa. For the next few years, he travelled around North Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia. He worked for two years on an Israeli kibbutz.
Arriving in England in 1968, Thompson leveraged his street kid background to get legal employment as a social worker in the East London borough of Hackney. In 1970, he began a community-based bookshop, with his first wife Margaret Gosley, and a publishing and social services cooperative called Centerprise, which operated until 2012. The first publication by Centerprise was a book of poetry by a 12-year-old boy named Vivian Usherwood, which sold 18,000 copies.
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Wikipedia