Andrea Thompson is a writer, spoken word artist, activist, and educator who has been publishing and performing her work for over twenty years. In 1992 she co-hosted CIUT’s radio show, HearSay, where she featured spoken word artists from across North America. In 1995 she was the host and producer of Telepoetics, Vancouver – one of the world’s first internet connected poetry series. Also in 1995, Thompson was featured in the documentary Slamnation as a member of the country’s first national slam team.
From 1996 to 1998, she served as the Executive Director of the Edgewise ElectroLit Centre – a non-profit dedicated to using online technology to advance literary arts. From 2004 to 2010, she produced several spoken word documentaries for CBC radio’s Outfront, and also worked at the League of Canadian Poets, where she helped to establish a process that would allow spoken word artists to apply for membership.
In 2005, her first spoken word CD, One, was nominated for a Canadian Urban Music Award. In 2007 Thompson helped facilitate the Spoken Word Pilot project, which served as the foundation of the Banff Centre of the Art’s current spoken word residency program. Later that year, she helped bring spoken word artists national exposure as host and researcher of Bravo TV’s thirteen part television series, Heart of a Poet. In 2008, Thompson became one of the first Canadian spoken word artists to tour the country’s Fringe Festivals with her one woman show, "Mating Rituals of the Urban Cougar". In 2009 she was awarded the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word’s Poet of Honour.
In 2010, Thompson co-edited the anthology Other Tongues: Mixed Race Women Speak Out. Also in 2010, she designed the curriculum and began teaching spoken word through OCAD University’s Continuing Studies department. In 2017, Thompson designed and began teaching another spoken word course through the University of Toronto’s Continuing Studies department. Also in 2017, she became a sessional professor at Brock University, teaching a fourth year poetry workshop. She has also taught through schools and community organizations across the country - using poetry and performance to help students of all ages engage in community, while developing their literary and performance craft as well as their literacy skills and self-esteem.
In 2018, Thompson returned to Brock to teach fourth year fiction, and later that year, released her second spoken word CD, Soulorations. In 2019 she was awarded the League of Canadian Poets’ Sheri-D Wilson Golden Beret Award for excellence in the art of spoken word. She is the author of the novel, Over Our Heads, the poetry collection Eating the Seed and is a graduate of the University of Guelph’s MFA Creative Writing program. Thompson is also the author of three critical essays on spoken word: "Committing the Act of Language: The (R)evolutionary Tactics and Hybridist Anxieties of Spoken Word's Third Wave" (More Caught in the Act, 2016), "Spoken Word: A Gesture Towards Possibility" (Writing Creative Writing, 2018) and the upcoming, “Spoken Word: A Signifying Gesture Toward Possibility” (Harriet Legacies, TBA).
