Cedric jennings biography

Biography.
The book is a biographical novel about the life of Cedric Jennings through his last years in high school and first years in college.
Cedric Lavar Jennings was born on July 24, 1977, the youngest of three children, in his native southeast Washington, D.C. He was educated.

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A Hope In The Unseen

The biographical novel A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League is journalist Ron Suskind’s first book and was released in 1998. It is the story of the years bridging the end of high school and the beginning of college in the life of Cedric Jennings. Cedric attended inner city Washington D.C.’s Ballou High School and went on to Brown University in Rhode Island. In addition to the effects of a struggling inner city school on his life, Cedric deals with poverty and surviving day to day as his single mother works but falls short of being able to pay for their needs, and with holding on to his dream of one day being able to attend an Ivy League college. The book has its roots in a Pulitzer Prize winning two-part series in the Wall Street Journal.

Cedric is different from most of his fellow students at Ballou. He is a serious student with aspirations. For this he is teased and threatened by others. In his junior year, he is accepted into a summer engineering program for minority students at the Massachusetts Institute of

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THE GATEPOST

By Tessa Jillson

Navigating multiple worlds can be challenging, but for Cedric Jennings, balancing these worlds ultimately derives from his faith and support.

On Oct. 3, in DPAC, Jennings discussed his biography, “A Hope in the Unseen” written by Ron Suskind.

Jennings grew up in southeast Washington, in a city plagued with crime. According to Jennings, he faced many challenges while attending high school, but through faith, perseverance and motherly love, Jennings managed to escape unscathed, with a ticket to Brown University in hand.

After receiving an acceptance letter from Brown, Jennings met Suskind, journalist for The Wall Street Journal, who turned his story into a book. In 1998, “A Hope in the Unseen” was published, attracting positive reviews from The New York Times.

Jennings said it was hard trusting Suskind in the beginning since Jennings grew up in an apprehensive environment where locals would “side-eye anybody that came into the community who was an outsider.”

He recalled the time when Suskind joined Jennings at Ballou High School

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Subject of the biography A Hope in the Unseen

KINGSTON, R.I. – September 17, 2010 –Cedric Jennings, the subject of the biography A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League by Ron Suskind will visit the University of Rhode Island on Sept. 22 and will speak at two sessions at 4 and 7:30 p.m. in Edwards Auditorium, 64 Upper College Road, Kingston. His talks are free and open to public.

More than 2,900 incoming freshmen read A Hope Unseen this summer as the University’s common reading book. Many URI faculty and staff members have also read the book.

The topics of race, adult development, access to higher education, and more, as discussed in this book, complement the University’s fall 2010 Honors Colloquium entitled RACE.

The book follows Jennings and his challenging journey through his last two years of high school as an A student in a challenging urban neighborhood in Washington, D.C. through his adjustment and transition to his freshmen year at Brown University. At Brown, Jennings sometimes feels profoundly alienated fr