Agent: Jane von Mehren, Aevitas Creative Management.

The result is an eye-opening examination of race, class, and privilege in America. Despite the challenges she faced, James reflects on the paradoxical sense of safety she felt as a “Talented-Tenth-respectability-obsessed-snob” and how, after graduating, she worked as an independent school admissions counselor peddling the “myths of American upward mobility” to low-income families, before finally confronting her trauma and speaking out about the pervasive racism in boarding schools. Taft, she recalls, was a school both uniquely attuned to and openly hostile to her development and that of other “expert, if involuntary, pioneers” who were forced to navigate the constraints of an institution that catered to its “white majority.” Notably, she recalls an unfounded accusation of theft by a classmate, that-after being threatened with police intervention-James was pressured to confess to. In a memoir filled with anecdotes you have to read to believe, James details her journey from. and ignored everywhere else.” The first Black American legacy to graduate from Taft School in 2006, James recounts her rude awakening when the “freedom and independence” she was promised as a student turned out to be the opposite. Early on in Admissions: A Memoir of Surviving Boarding School by Kendra James, the author recalls her experiences as one of a handful of Black students at a mostly-white, extremely privileged boarding school.

“To be Black in a New England boarding school,” she writes, “is to be touted for your statistical presence. Author of ADMISSIONS: A MEMOIR OF SURVIVING BOARDING SCHOOL, out now from Grand Central Publishing For all ADMISSIONS inquiries, please email me at Experience. That Black peopleor for that matter, any person of colorcould, and often did, adopt Black children. In this scintillating debut, former Shondaland editor James intertwines her own coming-of-age story with a searing indictment of elite academia. Kendra James, Admissions: A Memoir of Surviving Boarding School 1 likes Like These expensively educated children were, in that moment, learning brand-new information.

Kendra james author admissions