Black Authors

Mississippi Bridge

By: Mildred D. Taylor

Narrated by: Danny Gerard

Length: 53 minutes

Abridged: No

Another powerful story in the Logan Family Saga and companion to Mildred D. Taylor's Newbery Award-winning Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.

A day of conflict and tragedy.

Jeremy Simms watches from the porch of the general store as the weekly bus from Jackson comes through his town. His neighbor Stacey Logan and Stacey's brothers and sister are there... Read more

Song of the Trees

By: Mildred D. Taylor

Narrated by: Allyson Johnson

Length: 39 minutes

Abridged: No

Another powerful story in the Logan Family Saga and companion to Mildred D. Taylor's Newbery Award-winning Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.

With the depression bearing down on her family, there isn’t much that Cassie Logan can count on anymore. 

But there is one thing that hasn’t changed—the whispering trees outside her window. Cassie’s trees, which... Read more

The Road to Memphis

By: Mildred D. Taylor

Narrated by: Allyson Johnson

Length: 8 hours 42 minutes

Abridged: No

"Cassie recounts harrowing events during late 1941. An engrossing picture of fine young people endeavoring to find the right way in a world that persistently wrongs them." --Kirkus Reviews Read more

Sidewalk Story

By: Sharon Bell Mathis

Narrated by: Allyson Johnson

Length: 1 hour 10 minutes

Abridged: No

Council on Interracial Books for Children award winner

From the award-winning author of The Hundred Penny Box comes a sweet story about how one girl can make a difference. 

Lilly Etta didn't know the men, but she knew those yellow chairs. They were Tanya's, and they were being taken out of her building. Tanya was being put out - Tanya, her mother,... Read more

Soul Looks Back in Wonder

By: Various

Narrated by: Cary Hite & Allyson Johnson

Length: 11 minutes

Abridged: No

"The selections are uniformly uplifting, with affirming messages about the heritage, strength and dreams of African Americans."—Publishers Weekly

In this compelling collection, thirteen major poets rise in response to the dazzling vistas and emotionally vivid portraits of award-winning artist Tom Feelings.

A unique and moving collaboration that... Read more

Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush

By: Virginia Hamilton

Narrated by: Allyson Johnson

Length: 6 hours 59 minutes

Abridged: No

The first time Teresa saw Brother was the way she would think of him ever after. Tree fell head over heels for him. It was love at first sight in a wild beating of her heart that took her breath. But it was a dark Friday three weeks later when it rained, hard and wicked, before she knew Brother Rush was a ghost.

Why had he come to her, with his... Read more

The Road to Dawn

By: Jared A. Brock

Narrated by: Jared A. Brock & Ryan Vincent Anderson

Length: 9 hours 46 minutes

Abridged: No

A major literary moment: after being lost to history for more than a century, The Road to Dawn uncovers the incredible story of the real-life slave who inspired Uncle Tom's Cabin.

-He rescued 118 enslaved people
-He won a medal at the first World's Fair in London
-Queen Victoria invited him to Windsor Castle
-Rutherford B. Hayes entertained him... Read more

No Ashes in the Fire

By: Darnell L Moore

Narrated by: Darnell L Moore

Length: 6 hours

Abridged: No

From a leading journalist and activist comes a brave, beautifully wrought memoir.

When Darnell Moore was fourteen, three boys from his neighborhood tried to set him on fire. They cornered him while he was walking home from school, harassed him because they thought he was gay, and poured a jug of gasoline on him. He escaped, but just barely. It... Read more

Teacup Full of Roses

By: Sharon Bell Mathis

Narrated by: Peter Jay Fernandez

Length: 2 hours 55 minutes

Abridged: No

A New York Times Outstanding Book of the Year.

Joe's decision to leave home is prompted by despair over his Mother's blindness to his younger brother's talents and his older brother's drug addiction. Read more

The Journey of Little Charlie

By: Christopher Paul Curtis

Narrated by: Michael Crouch & Christopher Paul Curtis

Length: 5 hours 17 minutes

Abridged: No

Newbery Medalist Christopher Paul Curtis brings his trademark humor and heart to the story of a boy struggling to do right in the face of history's cruelest evils.

Twelve-year-old Charlie is down on his luck: His dad just died, the share crops are dry, and Cap'n Buck--the most fearsome man in Possum Moan, South Carolina--has come to collect a... Read more

Nobody Knows My Name

By: James Baldwin

Narrated by: Kevin Kenerly

Length: 5 hours 49 minutes

Abridged: No

James Baldwin’s Nobody Knows My Name records the last months of this famed American writer’s ten-year self-exile in Europe, his return to America and to Harlem, and his first trip south at the time of the school integration battles. It contains Baldwin’s controversial and intimate profiles of Norman Mailer, Richard Wright, and Ingmar Bergman.... Read more

Undead Girl Gang

By: Lily Anderson

Narrated by: Rebecca Soler

Length: 8 hours 20 minutes

Abridged: No

"A fun, fast read...it will resonate with readers who dabble in any sort of arts, dark or otherwise." --NPR.org

"With a singular and hilariously cutting teen voice, UNDEAD GIRL GANG is sure to be one of the most talked-about YA novels of the year." --BookPage

Veronica Mars meets The Craft when a teen girl investigates the suspicious deaths of... Read more

Voices of Black America

By: Author

Length: 1 hour 46 minutes

Abridged: No

This unique collection, compiled especially for Naxos AudioBooks, features original recordings from 1908–1946 of Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Exposition Address, the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Langston Hughes, the rarely heard humour of Charley Case, readings from God’s Trombones by James Weldon Johnson, and much much more. Read more

The Illegal

By: Lawrence Hill

Narrated by: Gideon Emery

Length: 12 hours 19 minutes

Abridged: No

Keita Ali has nothing: no bank account, no papers, no legal identity. A runner, he has fled home-- a brutal dictatorship that produces the world' s fastest marathoners-- to live as an illegal refugee in a wealthy western nation, surviving on winnings from local races. But the government is cracking down on illegal immigrants, so Keita-- who will... Read more

Carl Weber's Kingpins: Miami

By: Nikki Turner

Narrated by: Soozi Cheyenne

Length: 8 hours 12 minutes

Abridged: No

New York Times bestselling author Carl Weber has brought together eight of the best Urban Street writers to participate in the most highly anticipated series of 2015, the Kingpin series. Every city has an underworld leader. In the Kingpin series,
we will visit eight cities and ride along with that city's kingpin as he rules the streets. The... Read more

We Love You, Charlie Freeman

By: Kaitlyn Greenidge

Narrated by: Cherise Boothe, Karole Foreman & Myra Lucretia ...

Length: 10 hours 16 minutes

Abridged: No

Frustrated by the limitations of cross-race communication in her predominantly white town, a young African-American girl teaches herself to sign. Years later, Laurel uproots her husband and daughters from their downwardly-mobile, over-educated and underpaid life in the South End of Boston for Cortland County, Massachusetts. The Freemans are to... Read more

What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

By: Helen Oyeyemi

Narrated by: Ann Marie Gideon, Piter Marek & Bahni Turpin

Length: 7 hours 42 minutes

Abridged: No

From the award-winning author of Boy, Snow, Bird and Mr. Fox comes an enchanting collection of intertwined stories. Playful, ambitious, and exquisitely imagined, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours is cleverly built around the idea of keys, literal and metaphorical. The key to a house, the key to a heart, the key to a secret-Oyeyemi's keys not only... Read more

The Doctor Is In

By: Carl Weber & Brenda Hampton

Narrated by: Lynnette Freeman

Length: 8 hours 23 minutes

Abridged: No

Dr. Kasen Phillips has the magic touch when it comes to helping his patients who are in dire need of counseling services, but when the love of his life winds up missing in action, Kasen's life takes a horrific turn for the worse. His office manager, Voncile Harper, is there to lend a helping hand. She's on a mission to shake Kasen from his... Read more

Locking Up Our Own

By: James Forman, Jr.

Narrated by: Kevin R. Free

Length: 8 hours 39 minutes

Abridged: No

Former public defender James Forman, Jr., is a leading critic of mass incarceration and its disproportionate impact on people of color. In Locking Up Our Own, he seeks to understand the war on crime that began in the 1970s and why it was supported by many African American leaders in the nation’s urban centers.

Forman shows us that the first... Read more

An Extraordinary Union

By: Alyssa Cole

Narrated by: Karen Chilton

Length: 10 hours 1 minute

Abridged: No

As the Civil War rages between the states, a courageous pair of spies plunge fearlessly into a maelstrom of ignorance and danger, combining their unique skills to alter the course of history and break the chains of the past in New York Times bestselling Alyssa Cole’s first installment in The Loyal League ...

1861. Elle Burns is a former slave... Read more

A House Divided

By: Donna Hill

Narrated by: Karen Chilton

Length: 8 hours 34 minutes

Abridged: No

Families always have secrets. And secrets have the power to heal-or hurt. Now beloved author Donna Hill's enthralling novel explores the wrongs we do for the right reasons, and the ways we struggle to reconcile the truth. Journalist Zoie Crawford had to leave New Orleans to finally make her own life. Her grandmother, Claudia, inspired her to... Read more

Sugar

By: Bernice L. McFadden

Narrated by: Myra Lucretia Taylor

Length: 8 hours 44 minutes

Abridged: No

A novel by a critically acclaimed voice in contemporary fiction, praised by Ebony for its “unforgettable images, unique characters, and moving story that keeps the pages turning until the end.”

A young prostitute comes to Bigelow, Arkansas, to start over, far from her haunting past. Sugar moves next door to Pearl, who is still grieving for the... Read more

Smoketown

By: Mark Whitaker

Narrated by: Prentice Onayemi

Length: 13 hours 30 minutes

Abridged: No

The other great Renaissance of black culture, influence, and glamour burst forth joyfully in what may seem an unlikely place—Pittsburgh, PA—from the 1920s through the 1950s.Today black Pittsburgh is known as the setting for August Wilson’s famed plays about noble but doomed working-class strivers. But this community once had an impact on... Read more

White like Her

By: Gail Lukasik

Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne

Length: 9 hours 57 minutes

Abridged: No

In the historical context of the Jim Crow South, Gail explores her mother’s decision to pass, how she hid her secret even from her own husband, and the price she paid for choosing whiteness. Haunted by her mother’s fear and shame, Gail embarks on a quest to uncover her mother’s racial lineage, tracing her family back to eighteenth-century... Read more