The Good Lord Bird (National Book Award, 2013) James McBride (born September 11, 1957)[1] is an American writer and musician.

His mother, Ruchel Dwajra Zylska (name changed to Rachel Deborah Shilsky, and later to Ruth McBride Jordan; April 1, 1921 – January 9, 2010), was a Jewish immigrant from Poland.

[4][5] McBride is well known for his 1995 memoir, the bestselling book The Color of Water, which describes his life growing up in a large, poor American-African family led by an ethnically Jewish mother.

The memoir, which won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award,[6] spent more than two years on The New York Times bestseller list, and has become an American classic.

[7] In 2002, McBride published a novel, Miracle at St. Anna, drawing on the history of the overwhelmingly African-American 92nd Infantry Division in the Italian campaign from mid-1944 to April 1945.

Harriet Tubman served as an inspiration for the book, which gives a fictional depiction of a code of communication that enslaved people used to help runaways attain freedom.

The book, based on real events that occurred on Maryland's Eastern Shore, also featured notorious criminal Patty Cannon as a villain.

"[12] In December 2020, Emily Temple of Literary Hub reported that his novel Deacon King Kong had made 16 lists of the best books of 2020,[13] while in February 2021 it won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.

In 2023, he released The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store about the intertwining lives of African American, Jewish, immigrant, and white residents in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, largely taking place in the 1920s and 30s.