In this episode of Audicted, cohosts Katie O’Connor and Kat Johnson celebrate Black History Month in conversation with award-winning author C.J. Farley. The episode includes an excerpt from The Book of Baraka by Ras Baraka and Jelani Cobb. Download or stream the full episode here.
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On the importance of telling Black stories
C.J. Farley: Obviously, when people go missing, it's a terrible crime. But when stories go missing, it's not only a crime, it’s actually on us as a society. We're complicit in that crime in not telling the story, in not saying that this person deserves attention, deserves respect […]. And I think attention needs to be paid to stories of people like Lorraine Hansberry, a great creator, which, of course, Imani Perry does wonderfully. And attention needs to be paid to missing Black and Brown girls. And I'm just glad that Audible is telling all these kinds of stories to really help right the wrong of the crime of these missing stories in American life. Because it's so important to tell everybody's story in a rich, satisfying way.
On authenticity in performance
CF: Narration is vitally important. Not that long ago, I worked on a piece called The Mountain and the Sea by the poet Kwame Dawes. It was a love story set in Jamaica and I wanted to make sure, and Kwame wanted to make sure, that the voice, the narrator who read it, really was authentic, had a Jamaican accent. Because so often Jamaican accents are just butchered in Hollywood. So, for The Mountain and the Sea, we sort of went the extra mile: had a studio in Jamaica, [made] sure we cast our Jamaican narrator, Paula-Anne Jones, who just delivered a terrific, melodic performance. Her voice sounded like music and it really got the spirit of Jamaica. It really conjured up the sort of love affair at the heart of the book better. And again, it just really brought home to me the point that narration is so important. The way we speak really speaks to what we're speaking about. And as an executive editor at Audible, and someone who's looking to cast people in these roles, I always want to make sure it's authentic because the listener can feel—and the story will hit home more—when that reader is authentic the way Paula-Anne Jones is in The Mountain and the Sea.
Also in this episode:
Ras Baraka’s famous words speak to exactly who he is as a leader - a fiercely loyal member of his community. In this innovative and ground-breaking Audible Original, hear how Baraka - the mayor of Newark, New Jersey - grew from spoken-word artist....
For 16-year-old Geth Montego, zero o’clock begins on March 11, 2020. By June, she wonders if it will ever end.
"An insightful, eye-opening, and inventive story. C.J. Farley has penned a novel that sheds an important light on real issues facing young people today." (Angie Thomas, author of The Hate U Give)
"Zero O'Clock is a beautiful and timely YA novel that is both heartbreaking and whip smart, a glimpse into the world of virtual friendship, classrooms, and pop stardom." (Jeanne McWilliams Blasberg, author of The Nine)
"Thoughtful, provocative, and pounding with the fast-paced beat of a sharp-witted adolescent mind, Zero O'Clock is the story of a Jamaican American teen girl at the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic in New Rochelle, New York. C.J. Farley has created an irresistible heroine in Geth Montego. Simmering with justifiable anger at everything from the cancellation of her senior prom to racial injustices and police brutality, Geth manages to overcome grief, anxiety, and confusion to discover a new sense of herself and her ability to create change." (Karen Dukess, author of The Last Book Party)
"Zero O'Clock seems to have a direct line into the mindset of a modern teenager. I enjoyed it immensely!" (Alex Wheatle, author of Cane Warriors)
Meet. Love. Break. Recover. That’s been the routine of Staceyann Chin’s romantic life. But at 35, after yet another devastating breakup and overcome by an urgent and all-consuming desire to have a child, Chin realizes she’s running out of time....
Dr. Ayanna Howard is an innovator, entrepreneur, leader, and international expert in robotics and AI. In this powerful and thorough Audible Original, Howard draws on her personal experience as one of the few Black women working in the field of robotics. She shares the bias she experienced, and the ways in which the field of AI and computer programming too often produce machines that mirror the largely white and male world around them. Voice recognition systems have been rolled out that cannot hear female voices. The danger of bias is great, and while Howard warns about the risks of AI, she also delivers an uplifting and empowering message about where our society should go next — a message worth listening to.
Did you know that a Black man helped make the multi-billion-dollar video game industry possible? Jerry Lawson, born in Brooklyn and raised in Queens, led the team that invented The Fairchild Channel F, the first commercially available cartridge-based video game console, which revolutionized the industry. So why haven’t more people heard about Lawson? Podcaster Anthony Frasier dives deep into the true tale of an incredible inventor and engineer who helped to create new devices and launch new ideas that we’re still relying on today.
The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age 16, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's their families, their communities, their racial identities....
An essential journey through the American South - and the way it defines American identity - from one of our most extraordinary writers on race and culture at work today....
In 1960, Ishmael Reed, then an aspiring young writer, interviewed Malcolm X for a local radio station in Buffalo, and the encounter cost Reed his job and changed his life. In Malcolm and Me, Reed, the author of such classic novels as Mumbo Jumbo and the winner of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, reveals a side of Malcolm X the public has never seen before, and explores how the civil rights firebrand influenced his own views on working and living and speaking out, and left a mark on generations of artists and activists.
Malcolm X was one of the most influential human rights activists in history and his views on race, religion, and fighting back changed America and the world. Reed gives a clear-eyed view of what the man was really like - beyond the headlines and the myth-making. Malcolm and Me is also an intimately observed look at the development of an artist, and how chance encounters we have in our youth can transform who we are and the world we live in.
Esther, a painter living in Jamaica and recovering from the death of her husband, comes across a man on a mountain road with no memory of his past. As a hurricane rushes towards the island, she shelters the handsome stranger and names him “Monty”....
The first major biography of one of our most influential but least known activist lawyers that provides an eye-opening account of the twin struggles for gender equality and civil rights in the 20th Century.
Born to an aspirational blue-collar family during the Great Depression, Constance Baker Motley was expected to find herself a good career as a hair dresser. Instead, she became the first Black woman to argue a case in front of the Supreme Court, the first of ten she would eventually argue. The only Black woman member in the legal team at the NAACP's Inc. Fund at the time, she defended Martin Luther King in Birmingham, helped to argue in Brown vs. The Board of Education, and played a critical role in vanquishing Jim Crow laws throughout the South. She was the first Black woman elected to the state Senate in New York, the first woman elected Manhattan Borough President, and the first black woman appointed to the federal judiciary.
The classic work on American racism and the struggle for racial justice
In Faces at the Bottom of the Well, civil rights activist and legal scholar Derrick Bell uses allegory and historical example to argue that racism is an integral and permanent part of American society. African American struggles for equality are doomed to fail so long as the majority of Whites do not see their own wellbeing threatened by the status quo. Bell calls on African Americans to face up to this unhappy truth and abandon a misplaced faith in inevitable progress. Only then will Blacks, and those Whites who join with them, be in a position to create viable strategies to alleviate the burdens of racism. "Freed of the stifling rigidity of relying unthinkingly on the slogan 'we shall overcome,'" he writes, "we are impelled both to live each day more fully and to examine critically the actual effectiveness of traditional civil rights remedies."
A classic work of feminist scholarship, Ain't I a Woman has become a must for all those interested in the nature of Black womanhood. Examining the impact of sexism on Black women during slavery, the devaluation of Black womanhood, Black male sexism, racism among feminists, and the Black woman's involvement with feminism, hooks attempts to move us beyond racist and sexist assumptions. The result is nothing short of groundbreaking, giving this work a critical place in every feminist scholar's library.
On January 20, 2021, Amanda Gorman became the sixth and youngest poet to deliver a poetry reading at a presidential inauguration. Her poem “The Hill We Climb: An Inaugural Poem for the Country” can now be cherished in this special audiobook....
Black girls and women disappear every day, but not without a trace. Join actress and activist Erika Alexander in a neo-noir, true crime drama as she searches for Tamika Huston, a 24-year-old Black woman from Spartanburg, SC who went missing in 2004. Her case became a rallying cry for other missing Black women in America and led to a growing demand to expose a system that ignores missing girls and women of color.
Kevin Hart and Charlamagne Tha God’s SBH productions present their debut Audible Original Finding Tamika. In it, host Erika Alexander summons a new generation to help raise the dead, expose a hidden past, and give a dark warning for our future. In Finding Tamika, what we’ll actually discover is the awful truth that a Black girl does not have to go missing for us not to see her. No matter the cost, though, we must look for Tamika, because until she is found, we are all lost.
Please Note: This content is for mature audiences only. It contains adult language and themes. Discretion is advised.
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies explores the raw and tender places where Black women and girls dare to follow their desires and pursue a momentary reprieve from being good. The nine stories in this collection feature four generations of characters grappling with who they want to be in the world, caught as they are between the church's double standards and their own needs and passions.
Lorraine Hansberry, who died at thirty-four, was by all accounts a force of nature. Although best-known for her work A Raisin in the Sun, her short life was full of extraordinary experiences and achievements....
Not too many people get to see me off the court. I don’t get much down time, so whether it’s in the off season or in-between practicing my three pointers, I love to hear what is going down outside of my bubble. Getting a chance to talk to my friends, family and just about anyone who has something to say brings me so much joy and inspiration. But the big problem is, I have NO TIME! Sometimes the only window I have to myself is on the way home. Take a ride with me and my friends as we talk about the world around us and what matters, inspires and excites people from all walks of life.
Teresa Edwards has won more Olympic medals than any other basketball player in history with four golds and one bronze. She is the youngest woman to win a gold medal in basketball - and the oldest....
Growing up in New Jersey as the only African American Muslim at school, Ibtihaj Muhammad always had to find her own way. When she discovered fencing, a sport traditionally reserved for the wealthy, she had to defy expectations and make a place for herself in a sport she grew to love.
From winning state championships to three-time All-America selections at Duke University, Ibtihaj was poised for success, but the fencing community wasn't ready to welcome her with open arms just yet. As the only woman of color and the only religious minority on Team USA's saber fencing squad, Ibtihaj had to chart her own path to success and Olympic glory.
Proud is a moving coming-of-age story from one of the nation's most influential athletes and illustrates how she rose above it all.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
A New York Times reporter has drawn upon his experience covering the occupation in Iraq to write the most gripping and chillingly plausible thriller of the post-9/11 era. Alex Berenson’s debut novel of suspense, The Faithful Spy, is a sharp, explosive story that takes listeners inside the war on terror as fiction has never done before.
John Wells is the only American CIA agent ever to penetrate al Qaeda. Since before the attacks in 2001, Wells has been hiding in the mountains of Pakistan, biding his time, building his cover. Now, on the orders of Omar Khadri - the malicious mastermind plotting more al Qaeda strikes on America - Wells is coming home. Neither Khadri nor Jennifer Exley, Wells’s superior at Langley, knows quite what to expect. For Wells has changed during his years in the mountains. He has become a Muslim. He finds the United States decadent and shallow.
Yet he hates al Qaeda and the way it uses Islam to justify its murderous assaults on innocents. He is a man alone, and the CIA - still reeling from its failure to predict 9/11 or find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq - does not know whether to trust him. Among his handlers at Langley, only Exley believes in him, and even she sometimes wonders. And so the agency freezes Wells out, preferring to rely on high-tech means for gathering intelligence. But as that strategy fails and Khadri moves closer to unleashing the most devastating terrorist attack in history, Wells and Exley must somehow find a way to stop him, with or without the government’s consent.
An Oprah Winfrey-endorsed book and a New York Times best seller, The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz is an assembly of ancient wisdom reimagined for a modern audience. Ruiz bases his advice on the teachings of the Toltecs, predecessors of the Aztecs, who lived with a deep understanding of personal freedom and contentment. Throughout this audiobook, listeners will learn that life revolves around the different agreements we make. Whether these agreements are made with ourselves, with others, or with a higher power, they all impact how much freedom we have and what we choose to do with it. Veteran actor Peter Coyote, who might sound familiar to fans of documentarian Ken Burns (for whom Coyote narrated eight films), guides listeners through each agreement, ensuring that the lessons of the Toltecs are instilled with wisdom, eloquence, and grace.
The Last Podcast On The Left covers all the horrors our world has to offer both imagined and real, from demons and slashers to cults and serial killers, The Last Podcast is guaranteed to satisfy your blood lust.
In this life-changing book, Tabitha shares the wisdom she gained from her own journey, showing fans how to make a life for themselves that is rooted in nonjudgmental kindness and love, both for themselves and for others....
