ACCESS Book Club's RJ Picks

My Sister, the Serial Killer

A Novel

By: Oyinkan Braithwaite
Narrated by: Adepero Oduye
Length: 4 hours 14 minutes

“Does family always come first? In My Sister, the Serial Killer, a resentful older sister continues to enable her younger sister's serial killer tendencies. If you are looking for a dark and sardonic crime story, I recommend this unique audiobook! Read more

Hood Feminism

Notes from the Women that a Movement Forgot

By: Mikki Kendall
Narrated by: Mikki Kendall
Length: 6 hours 57 minutes

“Powerful. Important. Compulsively readable. Kendall’s narrative style is top notch - riveting and un-put-down-able. Not only is this a must read, it's a must pay attention. It's a must revisit and keep learning kind of book. Kendall dives deep and doesn't pull punches, but she doesn't seek to shame either. This is necessary reading for anyone... Read more

Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century

Unabridged Selections

By: Alice Wong
Narrated by: Alejandra Ospina & Alice Wong
Length: 8 hours 1 minute

“Containing dozens of personal stories, this is an absolute must-read for anyone looking to learn about the breadth, diversity, and history of disabled experience(s) from disabled folks themselves. Read more

Detransition, Baby

A Novel

By: Torrey Peters
Narrated by: Renata Friedman
Length: 12 hours 31 minutes

“This book led to my favorite book club conversation to date. The characters are messy and mostly unlikeable and Peters unflinchingly dives straight into topics in trans identity often considered taboo, without worrying about placating a cisgender audience. A quietly chaotic and fascinating character study. Read more

Killing the Black Body

Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

By: Dorothy Roberts
Narrated by: Shayna Small
Length: 14 hours 38 minutes

This is a no-holds-barred response to the liberal and conservative retreat from an assertive, activist, and socially transformative civil rights agenda of recent years--using a black feminist lens and the issue of  the impact of recent legislation, social policy, and welfare "reform" on black women's--especially poor black women's--control over... Read more

Bitter

By: Akwaeke Emezi
Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
Length: 7 hours 11 minutes

From National Book Award finalist Akwaeke Emezi comes a companion novel to the critically acclaimed PET that explores both the importance and cost of social revolution--and how youth lead the way.

After a childhood in foster care, Bitter is thrilled to have been chosen to attend Eucalyptus, a special school where she can focus on her painting... Read more

The Cancer Journals

By: Audre Lorde
Narrated by: Elizabeth Lorde-Rollins
Length: 3 hours 29 minutes

Moving between journal entry, memoir, and exposition, Audre Lorde fuses the personal and political as she reflects on her experience coping with breast cancer and a radical mastectomy.

A Penguin Classic

First published over forty years ago, The Cancer Journals is a startling, powerful account of Audre Lorde's experience with breast cancer and... Read more

The Mothers

A Novel

By: Brit Bennett
Narrated by: Adenrele Ojo
Length: 9 hours 54 minutes

“The 'mothers' of this book's title refers to the gaggle of elderly churchgoing women who comment on the congregation around them, especially the trio of Nadia, Luke, and Aubrey. But The Mothers is about more than that -- it refers to the concept of motherhood, whether biological, lost, aborted, adoptive, or conflicted. The three young people at... Read more

An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

REVISIONING HISTORY

By: Kyle T. Mays
Narrated by: Shaun Taylor-Corbett
Length: 8 hours 17 minutes

The first intersectional history of the Black and Native American struggle for freedom in our country that also reframes our understanding of who was Indigenous in early America

Beginning with pre-Revolutionary America and moving into the movement for Black lives and contemporary Indigenous activism, Afro-Indigenous historian Kyle T. Mays argues... Read more

The New Jim Crow

Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, 10th Anniversary Edition

By: Michelle Alexander
Narrated by: Karen Chilton
Length: 16 hours 56 minutes

Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.
Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been
adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of
the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the
winner of... Read more

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

By: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Narrated by: Laural Merlington
Length: 10 hours 18 minutes

Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the U.S. settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history.

Roxanne... Read more

Redefining Realness

My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More

By: Janet Mock
Narrated by: Janet Mock
Length: 8 hours 14 minutes

With unflinching honesty and moving prose, Janet Mock relays her experiences of growing up young, multiracial, poor, and trans in America, offering readers accessible language while imparting vital insight about the unique challenges and vulnerabilities of a marginalized and misunderstood population. Though undoubtedly an account of one woman’s... Read more

Care Work

Dreaming Disability Justice

By: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Narrated by: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Length: 8 hours 7 minutes

“A primer on disability justice, memoir, personal activism history, and love letter to disabled BIPOC femmes all at once. Read more

Medical Apartheid

The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

By: Harriet A. Washington
Narrated by: Ron Butler
Length: 19 hours 1 minute

Medical Apartheid is the first and only comprehensive history of medical experimentation on African Americans. Starting with the earliest encounters between black Americans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, it details the ways both slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted... Read more

Sister Outsider

Essays and Speeches

Crossing Press Feminist: Book #1

By: Audre Lorde
Narrated by: Robin Eller
Length: 7 hours 31 minutes

Presenting the essential writings of black lesbian poet and feminist writer Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider celebrates an influential voice in twentieth-century literature. In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action... Read more

Braiding Sweetgrass

Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

By: Robin Wall Kimmerer
Narrated by: Robin Wall Kimmerer
Length: 16 hours 44 minutes

As a botanist and professor of plant ecology, Robin Wall Kimmerer has spent a career learning how to ask questions of nature using the tools of science. As a Potawatomi woman, she learned from elders, family, and history that the Potawatomi, as well as a majority of other cultures indigenous to this land, consider plants and animals to be our... Read more

No Choice

The Destruction of Roe v. Wade and the Fight to Protect a Fundamental American Right

By: Becca Andrews
Narrated by: Marisha Tapera & Becca Andrews
Length: 9 hours 22 minutes

An in-depth look at the legacy of Roe v. Wade, and on-the-ground reporting from the front lines of the battle to protect the right to choose

The pieces started to fall In 2019 when a wave of anti-abortion laws went into effect. Georgia, Ohio, Mississippi, Louisiana and Kentucky banned abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, while Missouri banned... Read more

The Fire Next Time

By: James Baldwin
Narrated by: Jesse Martin
Length: 2 hours 25 minutes

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - The book that galvanized the nation, gave voice to the emerging civil rights movement in the 1960s—and still lights the way to understanding race in America today. - “The finest essay I’ve ever read.” —Ta-Nehisi CoatesAt once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin’s early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the... Read more

We Do This ‘Til We Free Us

Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice

By: Mariame Kaba
Narrated by: Diana Blue
Length: 9 hours 25 minutes

"Organizing is both science and art. It is thinking through a vision, a strategy, and then figuring out who your targets are, always being concerned about power, always being concerned about how you're going to actually build power in order to be able to push your issues, in order to be able to get the target to actually move in the way that you... Read more

Handbook for a Post-Roe America

By: Robin Marty
Narrated by: Charon Normand-Widmer
Length: 5 hours 27 minutes

This comprehensive manual for understanding and preparing for the looming changes to reproductive rights law explains how to get the healthcare you need—by any means necessary. Activist and writer Robin Marty guides listeners through various worst-case scenarios of a post-Roe America and offers ways to fight back, including how to acquire... Read more