Growin' Up White

A white boy grows up in a black neighborhood of Indianapolis during the racially tumultuous 1950s.

Dwight Ritter attended the John Herron Art Institute and graduated from Indiana University. He has been a copywriter, art director and creative director in advertising agencies in New York and Boston. His latest book is Growin’ Up White, the story of a white boy raised in a black neighborhood in Indianapolis, during the early 1950s. It is his 14th book which spans a prolific career as a writer and graphic designer. Educational curricula, children’s books, children’s television, fiction, business books, lyrics for tv commercials, and magazine articles illustrates his varied interests. Over the past thirty years many titles have been published by Harper and Row, Prentice Hall, Wiley, Allyn & Bacon, Irwin, Lighthouse Publishing, Coronet Instructional Media, Noble & Noble and Iron Press. To highlight only a few: · Conceived, wrote, filmed, edited and composed music for Being Amish, purchased by Bell and Howell for PBS distribution. A television documentary on the Amish faith. · Co-authored (with Victor Ziskin) Scotty and the Musical Kingdom, published by Harper and Row Publishers. This was a multi-disciplined k-6 educational curriculum that used music to reinforce basil learning skills. Workbooks, manipulatives, games and 96 songs, all created by his partner and himself——resulted in a curriculum that tested the educational adoption system. This program spun off a piano method published by Chappell Music and a Children’s Theatre produc¬tion of the same name. And one of the songs, “Friends” (music by Ziskin, lyrics by Ritter), was used regularly on Sesame Street. Ritter also wrote and illustrated three other El-Hi multi-media curricula. · Author of Relationship Banking and five other business titles, primarily how-to books on customer service and sales. More recently he has published feature articles in The Cape Codder (2009), Sporting Classics Magazine (2012), Wild West Magazine (2011) and Rodders Journal (2012). Apart from his creative work he is a Spanish language translator for Operation Walk in Nicaragua, Guatemala and Cuba.