Memoir & Biography

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

By: Maya Angelou
Narrated by: Maya Angelou
Length: 10 hours 10 minutes

“A lot can be said about this autobiography - it is one of the best I have ever read. The stories are personal and well accounted for, and the reader has no choice but to regard her life and strength through hardship so inspiring. Before reading I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, I had a good idea of Angelou through her poetry and lectures. Her... Read more

Between the World and Me

By: Ta-Nehisi Coates
Narrated by: Ta-Nehisi Coates
Length: 3 hours 35 minutes

“In this short and powerful book, Coates writes to his 15-year old son about his experience of being a black man in America. Cannot recommend enough! Read more

The Beauty in Breaking

A Memoir

By: Michele Harper
Narrated by: Nicole Lewis
Length: 7 hours 46 minutes

“This memoir is a fascinating examination of a life dedicated to helping others, and an illuminating, up-close view of what happens in emergency rooms. Moments of profound human connection exist alongside confrontations with dangerous and erratic patients, overzealous police demands, a lack of resources, and bureaucratic barriers. And the... Read more

Somebody's Daughter

A Memoir

By: Ashley C. Ford
Narrated by: Ashley C. Ford
Length: 8 hours 44 minutes

"Ashley C. Ford brings listeners into her life in this outstanding coming-of-age story...Listeners will cheer as Ford attends college and weep as she visits her father in prison, and when he is finally released." -- AudioFile Magazine, Earphones Award winner

This program is read by the author, and includes a bonus conversation between the author... Read more

My Soul Looks Back

A Memoir

By: Jessica B. Harris
Narrated by: Jessica B. Harris
Length: 6 hours 13 minutes

In the technicolor glow of the early seventies, Jessica B. Harris debated, celebrated, and danced her way from the jazz clubs of the Manhattan’s West Side to the restaurants of the Village, living out her buoyant youth alongside the great minds of the day—luminaries like Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison. My Soul Looks Back is her... Read more

Things I Have Withheld

By: Kei Miller
Narrated by: Kei Miller
Length: 7 hours 25 minutes

Kei Miller explores the silence in which so many important things are kept. He examines the experience of discrimination through this silence and what it means to breach it: to risk words, to risk truths. And he considers the histories our bodies
inherit—the crimes that haunt them, and how meaning can shift as we move throughout the world,... Read more

Song in a Weary Throat

Memoir of an American Pilgrimage

By: Pauli Murray
Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
Length: 19 hours 43 minutes

Poet, memoirist, labor organizer, and Episcopal priest, Pauli Murray helped transform the law of the land. Arrested in 1940 for sitting in the whites-only section of a Virginia bus, Murray propelled that life-defining event into a Howard law degree and a fight against "Jane Crow" sexism. Her legal brilliance was pivotal to the overturning of... Read more

Conversations with Myself

By: Nelson Mandela
Narrated by: John Kani
Length: 10 hours 1 minute

Nelson Mandela is widely considered to be one of the most inspiring and iconic figures of our age. Now, after a lifetime of taking pen to paper to record thoughts and events, hardships and victories, he has bestowed his entire extant personal papers, which offer an unprecedented insight into his remarkable life.

A singular international... Read more