James McBride

James McBride is an American author, musician, and journalist. Born in Red Hook, Brooklyn, in 1957, to a Black father and a white Jewish mother, he studied journalism at Oberlin College and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. He is the author of the celebrated memoir The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother (1996), which spent over two years on the New York Times bestseller list and has sold more than two million copies. McBride's novels include Miracle at St. Anna (2002), Song Yet Sung (2008), The Good Lord Bird (2013)—which won the National Book Award for Fiction—and Deacon King Kong (2020), a comic, warm-hearted novel set in a Brooklyn housing project in 1969. Deacon King Kong won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction in 2021, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and was a New York Times bestseller. His most recent novel The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store (2023) became a major bestseller. McBride is also an accomplished jazz musician and composer. He lives in New York City and Lambertville, New Jersey.