James McBride Will Discuss His New Book -The Good Lord Bird-At the Philadelphia Free Library

Writer James McBride

Abolitionist John Brown

“I was born a colored man and don’t you forget it. But I lived as a colored woman for seventeen years.” These are the words of “Onion” Shackleford, JAMES MCBRIDE’s latest protagonist, looking back on his years running with the ardent and often violent abolitionist John Brown and his ragged ‘freed’ slaves in the Kansas Territory in the late 1850s. Brown’s failed 1859 raid on the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia) is imprinted in history books, with no former slaves as survivors. But McBride uses the kidnapped Shackelford, disguised as a girl, as a fictitious lens to look back at our country’s ugly and rich history. McBride returned to Radio Times to discuss his new novel, “The Good Lord Bird.” -
Listen here: http://whyy.org/cms/radiotimes/2013/09/05/james-mcbride-retells-the-john-brown-story/

James McBride | The Good Lord Bird  (A) 
When: Thursday, September 12, 2013 at 7:30PM 
Where: Central Library
1901 Vine Street
Philadelphia, PA 19103
(between 19th and 20th Streets on the Parkway)

Cost: FREE
No tickets required. For Info: 215-567-4341. 

James McBride is the author of the New York Timesbestselling memoir and 2004 One Book, One Philadelphiaselection, The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother, in which “race and religion are transcended by family love” (New York Times Book Review). His novels include Miracle at St. Anna—which he adapted for Spike Lee’s film—and Song Yet Sung, a tragic and triumphant tale of a slave revolt in Maryland during the tense days before the Civil War. McBride is an award-winning composer and screenwriter and a former staff writer forThe Boston Globe, People, and The Washington Post. InThe Good Lord Bird, a young boy born into slavery joins abolitionist John Brown’s crusade, concealing his identity and gender to survive.

James McBride will be joined onstage by his band for the "John Brown Good God, Good Lord, Good Riddance Gospel Tour."

* Source- Free Library of Philadelphia