NAPERVILLE, IL – Esau McCaulley has another children’s book on the horizon. The Reading While Black author announced his forthcoming title, Isaiah Johnson and the Big Game, on Tuesday (Apr. 21).
McCaulley took to Instagram with the news. “Coming soon,” the author said. “A new children’s book exploring the power of forgiveness! Preorder Isaiah Johnson and the Big Game now!”
Esau McCaulley has written several books that focus on religion and race. His memoir, How Far to the Promised Land, delves into McCaulley’s Coming of Age experience in the South.
“The book is trying to humanize the people we often dehumanize,” McCaulley said of his memoir during a 2023 interview with Publisher’s Weekly. “When I first started working on it, I read a lot of what I call Horatio Alger stories dipped in chocolate—these stories of Black people who go from poverty to success and then it becomes a question of how they overcame it,” the author said.
“It’s kind of like the Hunger Games—because the Hunger Games allows people to think that if one person makes it in the system, the system isn’t broken. I really wanted to write a story with people who aren’t simply plot points in the hero’s narrative. So when I said ‘the disheveled masses’ aren’t always noble, I was saying that yes, the poor are poor for societal and cultural and political reasons, but we also are moral agents who make our own decisions.”
Making his own decisions led Esau McCaulley to lean into the full story of his formative years in the South. “My Christian faith has been one of the means by which I survive all of the things that America does to Black people,” he shared with Publisher’s Weekly.
“That’s the tricky part,” McCaulley continued. “Black boys in the South don’t always get to tell their stories, the things that we’ve seen on our journeys, and the role that God plays in all of it. We either get boxed into religious memoirs, or it’s a memoir about race politics in America. But what’s important to me is that I’m not just one of those things, but all of those things.”
“Poverty’s a part of the story. Race is a part of the story. Religion is part of the story. I really hope that readers will allow a human life to be as complex as it is. People ask you to sum up a book, but how do you sum up a life?”
Isaiah Johnson and the Big Game makes its debut on May 5, 2026.