James McBride

McBride grew up in Brooklyn and Queens as one of twelve children of a Black father and a white Jewish mother, a background he first explored in his bestselling 1996 memoir The Color of Water; he trained as a jazz saxophonist and composer and worked for years as a journalist before turning fully to fiction.

The Good Lord Bird (2013) narrates the radical abolitionist John Brown's final years and the 1859 Harpers Ferry raid through Henry 'Onion' Shackleford, an enslaved boy accidentally freed by Brown who is mistaken for a girl and kept in disguise throughout, its comic, vernacular voice cutting straight through American historical mythology to slavery's absurdity and horror; it won the National Book Award.

McBride has continued writing bestselling historical fiction, including Deacon King Kong, while still performing and composing music, and lives in the New York area.