Vintner Iris Rideau to launch memoir on June nineteenth in celebration of Juneteenth
June sixth – Santa Barbara, CA – Vintner Iris Rideau, the primary Black girl in america to ascertain a vineyard, pronounces the launch of her memoir From WHITE to BLACK: One Life Between Two Worlds on June nineteenth in celebration of Juneteenth. The memoir tells Rideau’s shifting and provoking rags to riches story of carrying out the practically inconceivable by a Black girl born right into a Creole household in New Orleans in the course of the Jim Crow period. The ebook will probably be launched in hardcover, paperback, and e-book codecs by 8790 Publishing Firm. Kirkus Critiques calls From WHITE to BLACK “An traditionally wealthy, exuberant, and vividly detailed portrait of a rare life.”
Rideau (née Duplantier) was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1936. She grew up within the seventh Ward of the town, a Creole part of city, which was thought of a comparatively secure haven for the household. Nevertheless, the cruelty Rideau suffered beneath the tough rule of Jim Crow precipitated her to know by the age of ten that she wanted to depart the South for a greater life in California.
The arc of Rideau’s life is traced in her memoir, highlighting durations of turmoil, together with sexual assault and racism. By sixteen, she was a single mom working in a stitching manufacturing unit whereas attending night time faculty. Michael Bernard Beckwith, Founding father of Agape Worldwide Non secular Heart, says of her memoir, “An inspiring and oftentimes defiant learn…an exquisite and poignant story of triumph and transcendence.”
After a yr, Rideau made her method out of that sweatshop and secured her first job working for an insurance coverage company, a transfer that helped launch her profession. After the Watts Riots in 1967, Iris based Rideau Insurance coverage Company to offer insurance coverage to hundreds of ineligible householders, Black-owned companies, and non-profit businesses such because the City Leagues that “white” insurance coverage corporations wouldn’t contact. Within the late Seventies, Rideau based her second firm, a securities agency specializing in pension plans for public workers. Her success caught the attention of the then-mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley. He introduced her on to offer casualty insurance coverage to the town’s Federal packages and implement the town’s supplemental pension fund managed by the Hartford Funding Group. From there, she moved up the company ladder, ultimately turning into influential on the earth of Los Angeles politics and the monetary world. “Rideau doesn’t look forward to alternatives—she makes her personal, whether or not as a profitable entrepreneur, a political change agent, or as a vineyard proprietor,” says The Wine Spectator.
Having managed each corporations for thirty years and later promoting each, Rideau left Los Angeles and moved to the Santa Ynez Valley in Santa Barbara’s Wine Nation the place she based Rideau Vineyard in 1997. The vineyard grew to become identified for its award-winning Rhone varietal wines. Rideau bought her wines immediately from her historic Adobe tasting room and at many memorable Creole-inspired vineyard occasions.
Scott Williams, govt producer of NCIS, provides, “Iris Duplantier Rideau shouldn’t be solely a modern-day pioneer, groundbreaking businesswoman, and award-winning vineyard proprietor, she’s additionally a superb author besides. From WHITE to BLACK is a superbly informed true story of extraordinary perseverance, limitless imaginative and prescient, and the facility of religion in oneself. Ms. Rideau’s illuminating trip by means of a long-ignored side of American historical past is endlessly fascinating and can go away you deeply impressed.”
Rideau will seem within the KPBS collection, Contemporary Glass, premiering in September 2022.
Books can be found for buy right here:
