BIPOC Authors

Possessed by Passion

By: Brenda Jackson

Narrated by: Ron Butler

Length: 5 hours 26 minutes

Abridged: No

They're discovering the healing powers of passion 

Burned-by-love architect Hunter McKay came home to Phoenix to open her own firm, not rekindle her fleeting high school romance with playboy Tyson Steele. But when she runs into the sexy surgeon at a nightclub—and he unleashes that legendary Steele charm—Hunter fears she's headed straight for... Read more

The Fervor

By: Alma Katsu

Narrated by: Traci Kato-Kiriyama & Louis Ozawa

Length: 10 hours 12 minutes

Abridged: No

The acclaimed author of the celebrated literary horror novels The Hunger and The Deep turns her psychological and supernatural eye on the horrors of the Japanese American internment camps in World War II.

1944: As World War II rages on, the threat has come to the home front. In a remote corner of Idaho, Meiko Briggs and her daughter, Aiko, are... Read more

Fat, Crazy, and Tired

By: Van Lathan Jr.

Narrated by: Van Lathan Jr.

Length: 3 hours 57 minutes

Abridged: No

Podcaster and former TMZ host Van Lathan Jr. writes a sharp, funny, and brutally honest, cultural critique of the unspoken obstacles and extreme anxiety that keep us from maintaining good health in America’s “wellness waistland,” explored through vignettes about his mental health and weight loss journey as a Black man.
 
  A formerly chubby kid... Read more

In the Face of the Sun

By: Denny S. Bryce

Narrated by: Tracey Conyer Lee & Lynnette R. Freeman

Length: 12 hours 2 minutes

Abridged: No

A candy-apple red Ford Mustang is parked outside my building. Unmistakable. My Aunt Daisy, the driver, is an audacious woman that no one in our family actually speaks to. They only speak about her—and not glowingly. Still, she is part of my escape plan …1928, Los Angeles: The newly-built Hotel Somerville is the hotspot for the city's glittering... Read more

Tough

By: Terry Crews

Narrated by: Terry Crews

Length: 9 hours 12 minutes

Abridged: No

From Brooklyn Nine-Nine star Terry Crews, the deeply personal story of his lifelong obsession with strength—and how, after looking for it in all the wrong places, he finally found it

Terry Crews spent decades cultivating his bodybuilder physique and bravado. On the outside, he seemed invincible: he escaped his abusive father, went pro in the NFL,... Read more

Culturally Responsive Teaching

By: Geneva Gay

Narrated by: Diana Blue

Length: 18 hours 59 minutes

Abridged: No

Geneva Gay is renowned for her contributions to multicultural education, particularly as it relates to curriculum design, professional learning, and classroom instruction. Gay has made many important revisions to keep her foundational, award-winning text relevant for today's diverse student population, including: new research on culturally... Read more

Santeria

By: Migene González-Wippler

Narrated by: Stacy Gonzalez

Length: 12 hours 39 minutes

Abridged: No

Brought to Cuba as slaves, the Yoruba people of West Africa preserved their religion's heritage by disguising their gods as Catholic saints and worshipping them in secret. The resulting religion is known as Santeria, a blend of primitive magic and Catholicism now practiced by an estimated five million Americans.



Santeria: The Religion is an... Read more

Rest Rituals

By: Valerie Oula

Narrated by: Valerie Oula

Length: 6 hours 1 minute

Abridged: No

Rest easy with this collection of over 50 powerful restorative techniques.

Good sleep—the kind that leaves you with increased mental clarity, steady energy, and excitement for the day ahead—can be elusive. But it’s within reach: vibrational energy healer and meditation instructor Valerie Oula has put together over fifty rituals for winding down,... Read more

Saving Our Sons

By: Marita Golden

Narrated by: Lisa Reneé Pitts

Length: 9 hours 22 minutes

Abridged: No

Listen to an intimate account of a mother's efforts to save her son. Telling her son's story against the backdrop of a society plagued by systemic racism, economic inequality, and mass incarceration, Golden offers a form of witness and testimony in a time of crisis for Black Americans.

Learn how to grapple with the realities of Black America.... Read more

Body Becoming

By: Roberto Ché Espinoza

Narrated by: Robyn Henderson-Espinoza

Length: 6 hours 23 minutes

Abridged: No

The body that Robyn Henderson-Espinoza inhabits is a nonbinary body, a trans body, a body in two races—and a body continually in discovery. Theirs is also a body on sojourn invested in experience, body understanding, and engagement in and for human thriving. Henderson-Espinoza relates coming into a new body story, beginning with the deep... Read more

One-Shot Harry

By: Gary Phillips

Narrated by: Leon Nixon

Length: 8 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

Race and civil rights in 1963 Los Angeles provide a powerful backdrop in Gary Phillips’s riveting historical crime novel about an African American forensic photographer seeking justice for his jazz musician friend.

Los Angeles, 1963: African American Korean War veteran Harry Ingram earns a living as a news photographer and occasional process... Read more

Queen of the Tiles

By: Hanna Alkaf

Narrated by: Catherine Ho

Length: 8 hours 39 minutes

Abridged: No

They Wish They Were Us meets The Queen’s Gambit in this “stunning…unforgettable” (Publishers Weekly) thriller set in the world of competitive Scrabble, where a teen girl is forced to investigate the mysterious death of her best friend when her Instagram comes back to life with cryptic posts and messages.

CATALYST
13 points
noun: a substance that... Read more

Shelter

By: Lawrence Jackson

Narrated by: Korey Jackson

Length: 11 hours 56 minutes

Abridged: No

When Lawrence Jackson accepted a new job teaching in Baltimore, he searched for schools for his sons and bought a house. This would be unremarkable but for the fact that he grew up in West Baltimore and his job was at Johns Hopkins, whose vexed relationship to its neighborhood, to the city and its history, provides a point of departure for this... Read more

Empty Vows

By: Mary Monroe

Narrated by: Tracey Conyer Lee & Ruffin Prentiss

Length: 10 hours 46 minutes

Abridged: No

In this scandalous follow-up to the Depression-era tale Mrs. Wiggins, awardwinning and New York Times bestselling author Mary Monroe brings even more period drama as a proper church-going woman ensnares a widower living too many secrets—and lies …Forty-something widow Jessie Tucker is beloved throughout Lexington, Alabama, for her kind heart and... Read more

Monarca

By: Leopoldo Gout & Eva Aridjis

Narrated by: Maria Liatis

Length: 3 hours 9 minutes

Abridged: No

“A work of art. In each of the pages, you will feel the flow of a powerful energy which will murmur to each of your cells that it is time to come out of hiding, to open the windows, to breathe freely, to dress colorfully… to fly.”—Laura Esquivel, author of Like Water for ChocolateA fable for all ages about a Mexican-American girl who transforms... Read more

Hope and Glory

By: Jendella Benson

Narrated by: Kelechi Okafor

Length: 11 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

One of the year’s most anticipated by Marie Claire, Essence, Debutiful, & GoodreadsA brilliant debut by a British-Nigerian author—a heartfelt family drama that will delight book club readers and fans of books like The Girl with the Louding Voice and Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows.“Jendella Benson has drawn such a compelling world. The... Read more

The Song of Our Scars

By: Haider Warraich

Narrated by: Haider Warraich & Fajer Al-Kaisi

Length: 9 hours 37 minutes

Abridged: No

A doctor’s personal and unsparing account of how modern medicine’s failure to understand pain has made care less effective

In The Song of Our Scars, physician Haider Warraich offers a bold reexamination of the nature of pain, not as a simple physical sensation, but as a cultural experience.

Warraich, himself a sufferer of chronic pain, considers... Read more

Real Life, Real Love

By: Gia Casey & Raashaun "DJ Envy" Casey

Narrated by: Gia Casey & Raashaun "DJ Envy" Casey

Length: 8 hours 26 minutes

Abridged: No

RaaShaun “DJ Envy” and Gia Casey met when they were two teenagers attending the same high school in Queens. They have been together for an astounding twenty-seven years and married for twenty. They have remained together through RaaShaun’s growing celebrity, a devastating (and very public) cheating scandal, and the births of six children. Now, a... Read more

Call Me Chef, Dammit!

By: Andre Rush

Narrated by: Chef Andre Rush

Length: 8 hours 13 minutes

Abridged: No

Read by the author.What does it take to go from growing up in a Mississippi housing project to becoming a master sergeant and a celebrity chef serving in the White House under four United States presidents?Call Me Chef, Dammit! is the inspiring story of Andre Rush, who became an overnight sensation in 2018, after a photograph of his now-famous... Read more

Activities of Daily Living

By: Lisa Hsiao Chen

Narrated by: Tina Huang

Length: 8 hours 29 minutes

Abridged: No

How do we take stock of a life—by what means and by what measure? This is the question that preoccupies Alice, a Taiwanese immigrant in her late thirties. In the off-hours from her day job, she struggles to create a project about the enigmatic downtown performance artist Tehching Hsieh and his monumental yearlong 1980s performance pieces. As she... Read more

The Romantic Agenda

By: Claire Kann

Narrated by: Adrienne Walker

Length: 9 hours 57 minutes

Abridged: No

One of...
Parade's Best Romance Books of All Time
NPR's Books to Celebrate Pride Month
Buzzfeed's Most Anticipated LGBTQ Reads of 2022
Goodreads' Most Anticipated April Romances
Betches' Books To Add To Your Spring 2022 Reading List

Joy is in love with Malcolm.
But Malcolm really likes Summer.
Summer is in love with love.
And Fox is Summer’s... Read more

Two Billion Caliphs

By: Haroon Moghul

Narrated by: Haroon Moghul

Length: 7 hours 46 minutes

Abridged: No

Explains the attraction of Muslims to their faith, and discusses the challenges contemporary Islam confronts, and how we might imagine an Islamic theology and identity ready to face tomorrow

Islam is often associated with and limited to the worst of the world—extremism, obscurantism, misogyny, bigotry. So why would so many people associate with... Read more

Born in Blackness

By: Howard W. French

Narrated by: James Fouhey

Length: 16 hours 48 minutes

Abridged: No

Traditional accounts of the making of the modern world afford a place of primacy to European history. Some credit the fifteenth-century Age of Discovery and the maritime connection it established between West and East; others the accidental unearthing of the "New World." Still others point to the development of the scientific method, or the... Read more

Insurrection

By: Hawa Allan

Narrated by: Hawa Allan

Length: 7 hours 45 minutes

Abridged: No

The little-known and under-studied 1807 Insurrection Act was passed to give the president the ability to deploy federal military forces to fend off lawlessness and rebellion, but it soon became much more than the sum of its parts. Its power is integrally linked to the perceived threat of black American equity in what lawyer and critic Hawa Allan... Read more