The Color of Water: The Search for Identity

Award-winning writer and musician James McBride to visit campus

October 06, 2009 — Best-selling writer, accomplished composer, and renowned saxophonist James McBride will speak to Phillips Academy students, faculty, and staff on Wednesday, Oct. 14, at All-School Meeting. He will then attend a luncheon in his honor and teach a master class in writing. McBride’s visit is open to Phillips Academy students, faculty and staff only.
 
“James McBride teaches all of us about our own identities and the necessary, sometimes painful search we endeavor to find our authentic selves,” says Aya Murata, who serves as faculty advisor to MOSAIC (Andover’s mixed-heritage affinity group), advisor to Asian and Asian American students and Pine Knoll cluster dean. “We deeply appreciate the Abbot Academy Association grant that made his visit possible.”
 
McBride wrote the 1997 memoir “The Color of Water,” which tells the story of how his white Jewish mother raised 12 black children in New York City and managed to send each of them to college. On the New York Time’s best-seller list for two years, “The Color of Water” is now required reading at many high schools and universities nationwide.
 
McBride’s debut novel, “The Miracle of Saint Anna,” was made into a film of the same name by Spike Lee; McBride also wrote the screenplay. His latest novel, “Song Yet Sung,” details the lives of fugitive slaves in pre-Civil War Maryland. The Times lauds “Song Yet Sung” as a “radically new way of telling the old story… [and a] balm for a wound that has so far stubbornly refused to heal.”
 
When he isn’t writing, McBride tours around the world, playing saxophone with his six-piece jazz and rhythm and blues band. He also has composed music for Anita Baker, Grover Washington Jr., Gary Burton and PBS’s purple dinosaur, Barney.
 
After studying composition at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio, he earned a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University at the age of 22. He is currently a distinguished writer in residence at New York University.

 For more information on McBride, visit www.jamesmcbride.com