The Library's Kimberly Benston Distinguished Speakers Series presents a reading, discussion, and Q&A with author James McBride.

6:30 p.m. Priority Access with Haverford ID

About Campus Read

The Campus Read is a collaborative project involving the Antiracism Curriculum Development Working Group, Customs, the Office of the Provost, the Student Life division, and the Institutional Diversity, Equity, and Access (IDEA) division.

The Campus Read has three aims:

• To build continuity and sustain forward movement within our community of students, faculty, and staff toward realizing the College’s antiracist commitments. 
• To deepen attention to the historical roots and enduring legacies of structural racism, specifically, but not exclusively, anti-Black racism, and inequality in American society. 
• To cultivate an appreciation for the centrality of racialized experiences, cultural production, resistance, and agency in the making and remaking American society and politics.

This year’s Campus Read is The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride. The book was selected by faculty and Senior Staff in the Antiracism Curriculum Development Working Group, in conversation with the Provost, the Dean of the College, Student Leaders in the Customs Program, and the Vice President for Institutional Diversity, Equity, and Access. It was chosen from a shortlist of nominations by committee members and the campus community that included recent fiction and non-fiction titles. We were particularly interested in works that traverse multiple temporalities, have a strong narrative arc, and that would be engaging and accessible to first-year students.

About the Book

From James McBride, author of the bestselling Oprah’s Book Club pick Deacon King Kong and the National Book Award–winning The Good Lord Bird, a novel about small-town secrets and the people who keep them. From the publisher:

"In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe’s theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe.

When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community—heaven and earth—that sustain us."

About the Author

James McBride is a New York Times bestselling author, musician and screenwriter. His landmark memoir, The Color of Water, was on the Times' bestseller list for two years and explored McBride’s search for identity as the son of a white, Jewish woman and a Black man. It is considered an American classic and is read in schools and universities across the United States. His debut novel, Miracle at St. Anna, was translated into a major motion picture directed by American film icon Spike Lee. James wrote the script and later co-wrote Spike Lee's 2012 Red Hook Summer. His novel Song Yet Sung was released in paperback in January 2009. His novel The Good Lord Bird, about American revolutionary John Brown, is the winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Fiction and has been adapted by Ethan Hawke and Jason Blum into a Showtime series bearing the same name. His 2020 novel, Deacon King Kong, tells the story of a 1969 shooting in Brooklyn and the strange intersections of the lives of the characters involved in the shooting. It was a Times bestseller, winner of the National Book Award, and named a favorite book of the year by both Oprah Winfrey and President Barack Obama.

McBride’s latest novel, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, tells the story of small-town secrets and the people who keep them. McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community—heaven and earth—that sustain us. The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store was a runaway bestseller and was named Best Book of the Year by NPR, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, TIME magazine, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble.

 McBride is also a former staff writer for The Boston Globe, People magazine and The Washington Post. His work has appeared in Essence, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times. His April, 2007 National Geographic story entitled “Hip Hop Planet” is a respected treatise on African American music and culture.

He has toured as a saxophonist with jazz legend Jimmy Scott, among others, and written songs (music and lyrics) for Anita Baker, Grover Washington, Jr., Purafe, Gary Burton, and even for the PBS television character “Barney.” He did not write the “I Love You” song for “Barney” but says he wishes he did. He received the Stephen Sondheim Award and the Richard Rodgers Foundation Horizon Award for his musical “Bo-Bos,” co-written with playwright Ed Shockley. His 2003 “Riffin’ and Pontificatin’” Musical Tour was captured in a nationally televised Comcast documentary. He has been featured on national radio and television in America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. He often does his readings accompanied by a band.

A native New Yorker and a graduate of New York City public schools, McBride studied composition at The Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio and received his Masters in Journalism from Columbia University in New York at age 22. He holds several honorary doctorates and is currently a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University.

In the fall of 2016, President Barack Obama awarded McBride the 2015 National Humanities Medal "...for humanizing the complexities of discussing race in America. Through writings about his own uniquely American story, and his works of fiction informed by our shared history, his moving stories of love display the character of the American family."

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Additional sponsors: Offices of the Provost, Institutional Diversity, Equity, and Access (IDEA), and the Dean of the College