Black Authors

The Light of the World

By: Elizabeth Alexander

Narrated by: Elizabeth Alexander

Length: 3 hours 44 minutes

Abridged: No

A deeply resonant memoir for anyone who has loved and lost, from acclaimed poet and Pulitzer Prize finalist Elizabeth Alexander.

In The Light of the World, Elizabeth Alexander finds herself at an existential crossroads after the sudden death of her husband. Channeling her poetic sensibilities into a rich, lucid price, Alexander tells a love... Read more

Pleasantville

By: Attica Locke

Narrated by: JD Jackson

Length: 13 hours 13 minutes

Abridged: No

LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILEY’S WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTIONFrom Attica Locke, a writer and producer of FOX’s Empire, this sophisticated thriller sees lawyer Jay Porter—hero of her bestseller Black Water Rising—return to fight one last case, only to become embroiled in a dangerous game of shadowy politics and a witness to how far those in power are... Read more

My Journey with Maya

By: Tavis Smiley

Narrated by: Tavis Smiley

Length: 4 hours 20 minutes

Abridged: No

A remarkable story of friendship, love, and courage.

When Maya Angelou and Tavis Smiley met in 1986, he was twenty-one and she was fifty-eight. For the next twenty-eight years, they shared an unlikely, special bond. Angelou was a teacher and a maternal figure to Smiley, and they talked often, of art, politics, history, race, religion, music,... Read more

Delicious Foods

By: James Hannaham

Narrated by: James Hannaham

Length: 11 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: No

Held captive by her employers -- and by her own demons -- on a mysterious farm, a widow struggles to reunite with her young son in this uniquely American story of freedom, perseverance, and survival.

Darlene, once an exemplary wife and a loving mother to her young son, Eddie, finds herself devastated by the unforeseen death of her husband.... Read more

The Secret Game

By: Scott Ellsworth

Narrated by: Scott Ellsworth

Length: 11 hours 11 minutes

Abridged: No

Winner of the 2016 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing: The true story of the game that never should have happened -- and of a nation on the brink of monumental change.

In the fall of 1943, at the little-known North Carolina College for Negroes, Coach John McLendon was on the verge of changing basketball forever. A protégé of James... Read more

On a Clear Day

By: Walter Dean Myers

Narrated by: Rebecca Soler

Length: 6 hours 16 minutes

Abridged: No

"Visionary. This book should be in every reader's hands." –JACQUELINE WOODSON, National Book Award-winning author of Brown Girl Dreaming

Young heroes decide that they are not too young or too powerless to change their world in this gripping, futuristic young adult novel by the New York Times bestselling author of the Printz Award–winning... Read more

Death of a King

By: Tavis Smiley

Narrated by: Tavis Smiley

Length: 6 hours 15 minutes

Abridged: No

A revealing and dramatic chronicle of the twelve months leading up to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination.

Martin Luther King, Jr. died in one of the most shocking assassinations the world has known, but little is remembered about the life he led in his final year. New York Times bestselling author and award-winning broadcaster Tavis... Read more

Brown Girl Dreaming

By: Jacqueline Woodson

Narrated by: Jacqueline Woodson

Length: 3 hours 54 minutes

Abridged: No

A New York Times bestseller and National Book Award winner

Jacqueline Woodson, the acclaimed author of Another Brooklyn, tells the moving story of her childhood in mesmerizing verse. 
 
Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African... Read more

When I Was the Greatest

By: Jason Reynolds

Narrated by: JB Adkins

Length: 6 hours 2 minutes

Abridged: No

In Bed Stuy, New York, a small misunderstanding can escalate into having a price on your head—even if you’re totally clean. This gritty, triumphant debut captures the heart and the hardship of life for an urban teen.

A lot of the stuff that gives my neighborhood a bad name, I don’t really mess with. The guns and drugs and all that, not really my... Read more

Twelve Years a Slave

By: Solomon Northup

Narrated by: Peter Jay Fernandez

Length: 8 hours 27 minutes

Abridged: No

Twelve Years a Slave (Originally published in 1853 with the sub-title: "Narrative of Solomon Northup, a citizen of New-York, kidnapped in Washington city in 1841, and rescued in 1853, from a cotton plantation near the Red River in Louisiana") is the written work of Solomon Northup; a man who was born free, but was bound into slavery later in... Read more

The Family Business 2

By: Carl Weber & Treasure Hernandez

Narrated by: Ezra Knight, Diana Luke, Lisa Smith, Adam Alexa...

Length: 9 hours 59 minutes

Abridged: No

In his typical jaw-dro In his typical jaw-dropping fashion, Carl Weber returns with part two of his New York Times bestselling Family Business series. He's brought along a friend in bestselling author Treasure Hernandez, and together they've added more drama and new family members to the mix. to the world of Duncans. By day they are upstanding... Read more

H.N.I.C.

By: Albert “Prodigy” Johnson

Narrated by: Cary Hite & Kim Johnson

Length: 2 hours 42 minutes

Abridged: No

Pappy tries to break out of the game before the head of his crew, Black, gets them all killed. Against his better judgment Pappy agrees to do one last job, but only because it's the price of his freedom. He knows Black can't be trusted. He knows his "brother" would rather see him dead than let him walk away. Yet he still agrees to do the job... Read more

Discovering Wes Moore (The Young Adult Adaptation)

By: Wes Moore

Narrated by: Wes Moore

Length: 4 hours

Abridged: No

From the governor-elect of Maryland comes a story of two fatherless boys from Baltimore, both named Wes Moore. One is in prison, serving a life sentence for murder. The other is a Rhodes Scholar, an army veteran, and an author whose book is being turned into a movie produced by Oprah Winfrey.
 
The story of “the other Wes Moore” is one that the... Read more

Intellectuals and Race

By: Thomas Sowell

Narrated by: Robertson Dean

Length: 5 hours 43 minutes

Abridged: No

Intellectuals and Race is a radical book in the original sense—one that goes to the root of the problem. The role of intellectuals in racial strife is explored in an international context that puts the American experience in a wholly new light.Intellectuals have played a major role in racial issues throughout the centuries. Though their... Read more

Coming of Age in Mississippi

By: Anne Moody

Narrated by: Lisa Reneé Pitts

Length: 15 hours 30 minutes

Abridged: No

Born to a poor couple who were tenant farmers on a plantation in Mississippi, Anne Moody lived through some of the most dangerous days of the pre-civil rights era in the South. The week before she began high school came the news of Emmet Till's lynching. Before then, she had "known the fear of hunger, hell, and the Devil. But now there was…the... Read more

Help Me to Find My People

By: Heather Andrea Williams

Narrated by: Robin Miles

Length: 9 hours 51 minutes

Abridged: No

After the Civil War, African Americans placed poignant "information wanted" advertisements in newspapers, searching for missing family members. Inspired by the power of these ads, Heather Andrea Williams uses slave narratives, letters, interviews, public records, and diaries to guide listeners back to devastating moments of family separation... Read more

The Shadowed Sun

By: N. K. Jemisin

Narrated by: Sarah Zimmerman

Length: 17 hours 55 minutes

Abridged: No

In the final book of NYT bestselling and three time Hugo-Award winning author N. K. Jemisin's Dreamblood Duology, a priestess and an exiled prince must join together to free the city of dreams from imperial rule.

Gujaareh, the city of dreams, suffers under the imperial rule of the Kisuati Protectorate. A city where the only law was peace now... Read more

The Family Business

By: Carl Weber & Eric Pete

Narrated by: Ezra Knight, Patricia R. Floyd, Michael Early, ...

Length: 12 hours 5 minutes

Abridged: No

New York Times best-selling author Carl Weber and award-winning novelist Eric Pete team up to deliver the first in a much-anticipated new trilogy. The Family Business features two times the heat, two times the fun, and two times the drama as the members of an unforgettable family (not to mention lovers and hangers-on) find their way in and out... Read more

The Mighty Miss Malone

By: Christopher Paul Curtis

Narrated by: Bahni Turpin

Length: 7 hours 53 minutes

Abridged: No

In the Newbery Medal and Coretta Scott King Award–winning Bud, Not Buddy, Bud met a girl named Deza Malone in a Hooverville. This is her story.
 
“We are a family on a journey to a place called wonderful" is the motto of Deza Malone's family. Deza is the smartest girl in her class in Gary, Indiana, singled out by teachers for a special path in... Read more

Brendan Buckley's Sixth-Grade Experiment

By: Sundee T. Frazier

Narrated by: Mirron Willis

Length: 6 hours 45 minutes

Abridged: No

Read about Brendan, a biracial boy who loves science, and his middle school adventures in this sequel to the Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe New Talent Author Award-winner Brendan Buckley’s Universe and Everything in It.
 
Brendan Buckley is headed to middle school on a whole new adventure. When his alternative energy idea gets him paired with... Read more

Playground

By: 50 Cent

Narrated by: Dwayne Clark & 50 Cent

Length: 4 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: No

Thirteen-year-old Butterball doesn't have much going for him. He's teased about his weight. He hates the Long Island suburb his mom moved them to so she could go to nursing school and start her life over. He wishes he still lived with his dad in New York City - where there's always something happening, even if his dad doesn't have much time for... Read more

Long Walk to Freedom

By: Nelson Mandela

Narrated by: Michael Boatman

Length: 27 hours 38 minutes

Abridged: No

The autobiography of global human rights icon Nelson Mandela is "riveting . . . both a brilliant description of a diabolical system and a testament to the power of the spirit to transcend it" (Washington Post).
Nelson Mandela was one of the great moral and political leaders of his time: an international hero whose lifelong dedication to the fight... Read more

The Other Half of My Heart

By: Sundee T. Frazier

Narrated by: Bahni Turpin

Length: 7 hours 49 minutes

Abridged: No

The story of biracial twin sisters—one black, one white—and the summer that tests their strong bond, from the author of Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe New Talent Author Award-winner Brendan Buckley’s Universe and Everything in It.
 
When Minerva and Keira King were born, they made headlines: Keira is black like Mama, but Minni is white like... Read more

Invisible Man

By: Ralph Ellison

Narrated by: Joe Morton

Length: 18 hours 36 minutes

Abridged: No

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time

Ralph Elllison's Invisible Man is a monumental novel, one that can well be called an epic of modern American Negro life. It is a strange story, in which many extraordinary things happen, some of them shocking and brutal, some of them pitiful and touching--yet always with... Read more