McBride, James

Abstract

One of the most interesting writers on race to emerge in the last decade of the twentieth century, James McBride (b. 1957) is an African American novelist, memoirist, and jazz musician. His memoir, The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother (1995), which spent two consecutive years on the New York Times Best Seller list, established him as a major figure in contemporary American literature. His novel The Good Lord Bird won the 2013 National Book Award for fiction. Both books revel in McBride's ability to find a new lexicon of race that embraces models of hybridity, heterogeneity, and racial complexity. Other significant works include Miracle at St. Anna (2001), Song Yet Sung (2008), and Kill 'Em and Leave (2016). He has written screenplays and teleplays in collaboration with both Spike Lee ( Miracle at St. Anna [2008], Red Hook Summer [2012]) and David Simon ( Parting the Waters [2000]). In 2015, McBride was presented with the National Humanities Medal by President Obama, who praised his work “for humanizing the complexities of discussing race in America.”