Christopher L. Webber

Cuba, New York, is my home town though I haven't lived there in many years. It's the kind of town everyone should be able to grow up in, a town where no one locked their doors and neighborhood picnics were the high point of the summer. It gave me the background to go on to Princeton and seminary and serve a variety of Episcopal Churches: urban, suburban, overseas, and rural. Parish ministry is a great school of writing with a weekly sermon and a monthly mailing to make sure you get plenty of practice. Marriage and family - four children and four grandchildren - rounds out the picture of a generally happy life. If writers are supposed to be unhappy, I don't fit the picture! My publishing career began with a Metrical Psalter that I developed to meet the need created by the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, That led to a request that I write a Vestry Handbook for Episcopal Churches, so I did, and that has just gone to a 4th edition. Discovering that writing can be fun, I wrote a number of small books - and at least one very large one - for the church and that led to my discovery of James W.C Pennington, a fugitive slave who became the first Black student at Yale. Pennington's biography "American to the Backbone," got the attention of the Wall Street Journal and international attention with the creation of an international seminar. Heidelberg University had awarded Pennington an honorary doctorate and continues to promote him. Following up on that, I wrote "Give Me Liberty," studies of leading American orators from Patrick Henry to Ronald Reagan and Martin Luther King, Jr. Working in a completely different direction, I spent time studying the first English-language epic, Beowulf, and decided it needed a sequel. Why had no one written a sequel to such a great story? So I wrote and self-published "Beyond Beowulf," the story of what happened next under Beowulf's successor, Wyglaf. Still unsatisfied, I decided there was a need for Wiglaf's wife's point of view and wrote "Yrfa's Tale." The three stories - including my own translation of Beowulf, were then published as "The Beowulf Trilogy." "And then I wrote . . ." a number of other books. There's "Dear Friends", for example, a re-write of St. Paul's epistles directed to American churches and, most recently, a hymnal: "The Sharon Hymnal: Songs of Justice, Peace, and Love." The last time I counted, Amazon listed about 37 books under my name - and several under my name that are not mine. There's a Christopher Webber out there (NOTICE: no middle initial) - maybe more than one - who writes about the zarzuela and the Thracians, and then there's the Christopher Webber who became famous playing basketball and still shows up as a commentator. What's next? Maybe my biography of the first credentialed Black doctor, James McCune Smith who grew up in New York City in slavery but was enabled to go to Scotland to earn a BA, an MA, and an MD and return to the United States to practice in New York City and play a major role in the pre-Civil War abolition movement. Maybe my next hymnal, Songs of the Saints. Keep checking. There are books that need to be written and I'm doing my best to get them written - and published!