Great Writer, James McBride, THE COLOR OF WATER

Published: 1996, 311 pages

Dialectic Journal/Lesson Plans: 87 pages, 41,596 words, visuals

James McBride:

James McBride is an accomplished musician and author of the National Book Award–winning The Good Lord Bird, the #1 bestselling American classic The Color of Water, and the bestsellers Song Yet Sung and Miracle at St. Anna, which was turned into a film by Spike Lee. A graduate of Oberlin College, McBride has a master’s in journalism from Columbia University. He holds several honorary doctorates and is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University.

Ruth McBride Jordan 

Ruth McBride Jordan was born Rachel Deborah Shilsky (Ruchel Dwajra Zylska) in Poland, in 1921. Her family immigrated to America when she was two, and eventually settled in Suffolk, Virginia. After high school she moved to New York City and married Andrew D. McBride, with whom she founded the New Brown Memorial Baptist Church in Brooklyn, New York. After her husband’s death in 1957, she remarried, to Hunter Jordan, who died in 1972. She is a 1986 graduate of Temple University in Philadelphia, where she received her degree in Social Work Administration at age 65. Today Ruth travels to Paris, London, New York, and Atlanta regularly; works as a volunteer with the Philadelphia Emergency Center, a shelter for homeless teenage mothers; runs a reading club in the Ewing, New Jersey, public library; and works at the Jerusalem Baptist church in Trenton, New Jersey, in their program to feed the homeless. She lives in Ewing township with her daughter Kathy Jordan and Kathy’s two children, Gyasi and Maya. She has twelve children and twenty grandchildren.

“I wrote this book for my mother, and her mother, and mothers everywhere.”