Black Authors

The Forest Demands Its Due

By: Kosoko Jackson

Narrated by: Desean Terry

Length: 11 hours 25 minutes

Abridged: No

A Lesson in Vengeance meets The Taking of Jake Livingston in this page-turning dark academia novel about a queer Black teen who discovers the sinister history of his boarding school and the corrupt powers behind it all. A USA Today bestseller!Regent Academy has a long and storied history in Winslow, Vermont, as does the forest that surrounds it.... Read more

Gone Wolf

By: Amber McBride

Narrated by: Ariel Blake

Length: 8 hours 24 minutes

Abridged: No

"Ariel Blake’s tender narration and youthful delivery will captivate listeners in this remarkable dual-timeline middle-grade audiobook." - Booklist

Award-winning author Amber McBride, whose previous book, Me (Moth), was a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, lays bare the fears of being young and Black in America in... Read more

Salt the Water

By: Candice Iloh

Narrated by: Mila Myles

Length: 2 hours 51 minutes

Abridged: No

A Michael L. Printz Award Honor Book

Cerulean Gene is free everywhere except school, where they’re known for repeatedly challenging authority. Raised in a free-spirited home by two loving parents who encourage Cerulean to be their full self, they’ve got big dreams of moving cross-country to live off the grid with their friends after graduation.... Read more

The Girl with Special Shoes

By: Hilda Bih Muluh

Narrated by: Hilda Bih Muluh

Length: 7 hours 11 minutes

Abridged: No

Hilda’s family didn’t know she had muscular dystrophy. They just knew their preschooler was losing her ability to walk. But they were determined to find a cure.

Being disabled in Cameroon meant not only obstacles to transport, but visits to diviners and evangelists, threats of sexual assault, discrimination, and a crisis of faith. Despite the... Read more

Shadow Speaker

By: Nnedi Okorafor

Narrated by: Délé Ogundiran

Length: 10 hours 27 minutes

Abridged: No

A deluxe, expanded edition of an out-of-print early novel from Africanfuturist luminary Nnedi Okorafor, with a brand-new introduction from the author.



Niger, West Africa, 2074



It is an era of tainted technology and mysterious mysticism. A great change has happened all over the planet, and the laws of physics aren't what they used to be.



Within all... Read more

I Am Not Sidney Poitier

By: Percival Everett

Narrated by: Amir Abdullah

Length: 7 hours 34 minutes

Abridged: No

I Am Not Sidney Poitier is an irresistible comic novel from the master storyteller Percival Everett



I was, in life, to be a gambler, a risk-taker, a swashbuckler, a knight. I accepted, then and there, my place in the world. I was a fighter of windmills. I was a chaser of whales. I was Not Sidney Poitier.



Not Sidney Poitier is an amiable young man... Read more

Alex Wise vs. the End of the World

By: Terry J. Benton-Walker

Narrated by: Torian Brackett

Length: 11 hours 5 minutes

Abridged: No

Welcome to the summer of the apocalypse. One 12-year-old boy leads the charge against the forces of evil as he tries to stop the Four Horsemen from taking over the world in the start to a wildly funny and addictive fantasy series about accepting yourself and finding your inner hero.

Alex Wise feels like his world is ending. His best friend,... Read more

The Memory Thieves

By: Dhonielle Clayton

Narrated by: Joniece Abbott-Pratt

Length: 11 hours 10 minutes

Abridged: No

The fantasy adventure sequel to the instant New York Times and #1 Indie Bestseller, The Marvellers by Dhonielle Clayton! Return for Year Two at the global magic school in the sky in The Memory Thieves.

"The Marvellers deserves the highest compliment I can give a book: I want to live in this world." —Rick Riordan, #1 New York Times... Read more

The Darkened Light of Faith

By: Melvin L. Rogers

Narrated by: Diontae Black

Length: 14 hours 55 minutes

Abridged: No

This audiobook narrated by Diontae Black gives a powerful account of what a group of nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American activists, intellectuals, and artists can teach us about democracyCould the African American political tradition save American democracy? African Americans have had every reason to doubt America's democratic... Read more

The Changing Man

By: Tomi Oyemakinde

Narrated by: Afolabi Alli & Fola Evans-Akingbola

Length: 8 hours 42 minutes

Abridged: No

A teenage girl is pulled into investigating the truth behind her new boarding school’s decades-old legend in The Changing Man, this debut Young Adult speculative thriller by Tomi Oyemakinde

Face front. Watch your back. BE BRAVE.

If it was left to her, Ife Adebola wouldn’t be starting at Nithercott School. Because despite her being in the Urban... Read more

A Crown So Cursed

By: L.L. McKinney

Narrated by: Jacob York, Jeanette Illidge & Thomas Durham

Length: 13 hours 33 minutes

Abridged: No

"The fantasy series I've been waiting for my whole life."
—Angie Thomas, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The Hate U Give

Alice must save Wonderland from itself in A Crown So Cursed, the long-awaited third audiobook in L.L. McKinney's Nightmare-Verse series.

Alice and her crew are doing their best to recover from the last boss battle, but... Read more

Viper's Dream

By: Jake Lamar

Narrated by: Leon Nixon

Length: 6 hours 10 minutes

Abridged: No

Harlem, 1936. Clyde “The Viper” Morton boards a train from Alabama to Harlem to chase his dreams of being a jazz musician. When his talent fails him, he becomes caught up in the dangerous underbelly of Harlem’s drug trade, leaving him to decide what he's willing to give up and what he wants to fight for. A heartbreaking and fast-paced story... Read more

All Hope is Found

By: Sarah Jakes Roberts

Narrated by: Sarah Jakes Roberts

Length: 3 hours 26 minutes

Abridged: No

Read by the author.Hope is not a wish waiting to come true. It's not an external desire waiting to be realized. Hope is an ever-present reality regardless of how dire a situation may seem.
Undoubtedly, there are moments when hope is obscure. That's because hope has many hiding places. It hides behind heartbreak, camouflages in stress, and... Read more

May We Meet in the Heavenly World

By: Thabiti M. Anyabwile

Narrated by: Bill Andrew Quinn

Length: 2 hours 34 minutes

Abridged: No

Through both the biographical essay and the selections from Lemuel Haynes’s writings, readers are sure to perceive an Edwardsian sense of spirituality that ever lived in view of eternity. Well acquainted with difficulties, suffering, and death, Haynes’s ministry was infused with the unfailing hope of heaven. Read more

Baseball's Leading Lady

By: Andrea Williams

Narrated by: Deanna Anthony

Length: 5 hours 31 minutes

Abridged: No

Before Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball's color barrier in 1947, Negro Leagues Baseball was the only game in town for black athletes. And those leagues owed their existence and success to savvy businesspeople like Effa Manley, the black female co-owner of the Newark Eagles. Effa was the team's business manager, leading her team to win... Read more

Sing a Black Girl's Song

By: Ntozake Shange

Narrated by: Alfre Woodard, D. Woods, Regina Taylor, Lynn Wh...

Length: 9 hours 8 minutes

Abridged: No

The Millions “Most Anticipated” Books of 2023

Never-before-seen unpublished works by award-winning American literary icon Ntozake Shange, featuring essays, plays, and poems from the archives of the seminal Black feminist writer who stands alongside giants like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, curated by National Book Award winner Imani Perry with... Read more

Punished for Dreaming

By: Bettina L. Love

Narrated by: Bettina L. Love & Karen Chilton

Length: 11 hours 40 minutes

Abridged: No

This program features an introduction read by the author.

“I am an eighties baby who grew to hate school. I never fully understood why. Until now. Until Bettina Love unapologetically and painstakingly chronicled the last forty years of education ‘reform’ in this landmark book. I hated school because it warred on me. I hated school because I loved... Read more

Monstrous

By: Jessica Lewis

Narrated by: Alexis Campbell

Length: 12 hours 8 minutes

Abridged: No

Forced to spend her summer in her aunt's strange small town, a teen girl discovers dark secrets hidden in the woods. From the author of Bad Witch Burning comes another pulse-pounding novel perfect for fans of Supernatural and Lovecraft Country.

Don't go outside past dark. Come straight home after church. And above all—never, ever, go into Red... Read more

To Build a Black Future

By: Christopher Paul Harris

Narrated by: Landon Woodson

Length: 7 hours 46 minutes

Abridged: No

This audiobook narrated by Landon Woodson shares how the new Black politics can forge a future centered on collective action, community, and careWhen #BlackLivesMatter emerged in 2013, it animated the most consequential Black-led mobilization since the civil rights and Black power era. Today, the hashtag turned rallying cry is but one expression... Read more

Coleman Hill

By: Kim Coleman Foote

Narrated by: Bahni Turpin & Dion Graham

Length: 9 hours 29 minutes

Abridged: No

Coleman Hill is the exhilarating story of two American families whose fates become intertwined in the wake of the Great Migration. Braiding fact and fiction, it is a remarkable, character-rich tour de force exploring the ties that bind three generations. In 1916, Celia Coleman and Lucy Grimes flee the racism and poverty of their homes in the... Read more

I Wasn't Supposed to Be Here

By: Jonathan Conyers

Narrated by: Jonathan Conyers, Imani Bruno, Dr. Jarvis Watso...

Length: 10 hours 55 minutes

Abridged: No

 As seen on Humans of New York, Jonathan Conyers introduces us to the teachers, his debate coach, drug dealers, and a boy named Diego who changed his life.
 
Everybody was rooting for Jonathan Conyers after seeing his profile on Humans of New York went viral and sparked millions in donations to the Brooklyn Debate League. The kid who went from... Read more

After Botham

By: Allisa Charles-Findley & Jeremiah Cobra

Narrated by: Reina Mystique

Length: 6 hours 24 minutes

Abridged: No

On September 6, 2018, White Dallas police officer Amber Guyger opened the door of Apartment 1478. Inside, Botham Jean lay on his couch, having hung up from his daily call with his sister, Allisa. She’d encouraged her brother to stay home for the night’s opening Dallas Cowboys game as sports bars would be too dangerous. Guyger instantly assumed... Read more

The Light on Halsey Street

By: Vanessa Miller

Narrated by: Je Nie Fleming

Length: 8 hours 54 minutes

Abridged: No

Two girls’ lives are irrevocably intertwined the summer of 1985 in the streets of Brooklyn, New York, and neither will ever be the same in this coming-of-age story that spans decades.In the summer of 1985, Lisa Whitaker is a church kid headed to college on a scholarship while her best friend, Dana, is floundering in the wake of her mother’s... Read more

The Adversity of Diversity

By: Carol M. Swain & Mike Towle

Narrated by: Carol M. Swain & Freddy Richardson

Length: 4 hours 22 minutes

Abridged: No

When the US Supreme Court announced its landmark 6-3 decision to take race out of the equation for college and university admissions, it did more than just bring Affirmative Action in higher education to a screeching halt. It also fired a warning shot across the bow of businesses and governmental agencies across America: the days for workplace... Read more