James McBride is the author of the National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird, “a brilliant romp of a novel” (The New York Times Book Review) in which a young boy born into slavery joins abolitionist John Brown’s doomed crusade. He is also the author of the bestselling memoir The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother and the biography Kill ’Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul. His other fiction includes the novels Miracle at St. Anna, Song Yet Sung, and Deacon King Kong, which was an Oprah’s Book Club pick. Also an award-winning composer, screenwriter, journalist, and saxophonist, he is a distinguished writer in residence at New York University and received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2016. In The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, McBride tells a story of small town secrets, cultural collisions, and the sustaining love of community—in Pottstown, Pennsylvania.

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