Born in Harlem, New York, he moved in 1968 to England, where he 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 and his younger brother Dennis Thompson (born 1942) were picked up by the welfare department and sent to a children's shelter.
[2] 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,[1] which operated until 2012.
[5] Thompson worked for Penguin Education for a time, and then, in 1976, with his second wife Sian Williams,[6] and like-minded friends John Berger, Lisa Appignanesi, Richard Appignanesi, Arnold Wesker and Chris Searle, Thompson founded the Writers and Readers Cooperative to publish books,[6] with authors including Tony Medina, Suheir Hammad, Safiya Henderson-Holmes, and Asha Bandele, as well as Huey P.