Showing results by narrator "Lisa Reneé Pitts" in All Categories

After the latest mission of the starship Flying Dutchman, Earth is safe not just for a year, but for hundreds of years. The ship’s weary crew wonders what they will do with their lives in peacetime, but the enemy has other plans, and there is danger on the Homefront. Starring Zachary Quinto, R.C. Bray, Kate Mulgrew, Robert Picardo, and everyone's favorite AI, Skippy the Magnificent, alongside a full cast. Includes plenty of pew-pew-pew, original sound composition, and maybe some singing by R.C. Bray.

What if you could travel back in time 100 years and right the wrongs of the past—would you take the risk? “Sundown: A Time Travel Society Mystery” is a wildly imaginative podcast from Michael Dante DiMartino, the co-creator of the animated classics “Avatar: The Last Airbender” and “The Legend of Korra.” “Sundown” explores the story of a group of teens who go back into the past and uncover secrets about themselves, their families, their town—and America. 17-year-old Darius Hightower (played by Emmy-nominated actor Asante Blackk of “When They See Us”) is just about the only Black person in his small New England town of Norhaven. Adopted by a wealthy white family when he was a baby, Darius has learned to keep his head down and not challenge his family or its history. But when the outspoken Sanaa Starr (played by NAACP Image Award-winner Storm Reid of “Euphoria”) transfers to his high school and starts asking questions, Darius re-examines the truth about his ancestors’ involvement in the town’s most infamous murder. A time capsule from 1920 may hold some clues, but when Norhaven’s most powerful conspire to destroy its contents, it’s up to Darius, Sanaa, and their friends (including “Reservation Dogs” star Devery Jacobs) to investigate what really happened. After a strange incident sends them back 100 years to the scene of the crime, their fact-finding mission becomes life-or-death. Forced to confront their town’s prejudiced past, the teens race against time in order save an innocent man’s life and clear his name. “Sundown” is a sci-fi mystery adventure like you’ve never heard before.

The beloved #1 Essence best-selling authors of Tryin' to Sleep in the Bed You Made now deliver a novel in which you'll meet their most unforgettable characters yet. Carmen, Jewel, and Regina could not be more different. When they meet as freshmen at Columbia University, they're pretty confident that a friendship among them isn't in the cards.

As MacArthur award-winning educator Lisa Delpit reminds us - and as all research shows - there is no achievement gap at birth. In her long-awaited second book, Delpit presents a striking picture of the elements of contemporary public education that conspire against the prospects for poor children of color, creating a persistent gap in achievement during the school years that has eluded several decades of reform. Delpit reflects on two decades of reform efforts that have still left a generation of poor children of color feeling that higher educational achievement isn't for them.

Some great teachers are born, but most are self-made. And the way to make yourself a great teacher is to learn to think and act like one. In this updated second edition of the bestselling Never Work Harder Than Your Students, Robyn R. Jackson reaffirms that every teacher can become a master teacher. The secret is not a specific strategy or technique, nor it is endless hours of prep time. It's developing a master teacher mindset.

Blanche White returns to Farleigh, North Carolina for the summer to help her best friend with her catering business. It's a homecoming rich with the potential for new romance and fraught with the pain of facing the man who raped her at knife-point years ago but was never prosecuted for the crime. Shortly after Blanche arrives, a young woman is murdered and the clues point to the rapist. Blanche investigates, determined not to let him get away with another crime...nor is she willing to let his money-hungry sister marry a sweet, mentally-challenged man for his wealth.

The first book to explore the historical role and residual impact of the Green Book, a travel guide for Black motorists.

In this powerful call to action, New York Times bestselling author Mariame Kaba and attorney and organizer Andrea J. Ritchie detail why policing doesn't stop violence, instead perpetuating widespread harm; outline the many failures of contemporary police reforms; and explore demands to defund police, divest from policing, and invest in community resources to create greater safety through a Black feminist lens. No More Police makes a compelling case for a world where the tools required to prevent, interrupt, and transform violence in all its forms are abundant.

Legendary woman aren't just those in the history books or leading in business or politics. They are everyday women - the single mom, the prayer leader, the stay-at-home wife - who choose to say yes to God. That one simple act can create a legendary legacy that lives on from generation to generation and forever changes the course of humankind as we know it. In Legendary Woman, Bible teacher Michelle McClain-Walters gives flight to the legendary nature in each woman who dares to dream and risk everything to live out her divine purpose.

“Watkins’s prose is effortless and forthright. . . . This is an impressive feat of storytelling. . . . It’s a difficult read and a tender story of silences and secrets. It’s a novel about coming home, despite that home being broken. And it’s a brave triumph of a novel that readers...

As the only African-American soloist dancing with the prestigious American Ballet Theatre, Misty Copeland has made history. But when she first placed her hands on the barre at an after-school community center, no one expected the undersized, anxious 13-year-old to become a ground­breaking ballerina. Life in Motion is a story of passion and grace for anyone who has dared to dream of a different life.

Jean Toomer's Cane is one of the most significant works to come out of the Harlem Renaissance, and is considered to be a masterpiece in American modernist literature because of its distinct structure and style. First published in 1923 and told through a series of vignettes, Cane uses poetry, prose, and play-like dialogue to create a window into the varied lives of African Americans living in the rural South and urban North during a time when Jim Crow laws pervaded and racism reigned.

When Blanche White moved north to Boston, she believed it would be a better place to raise her kids, especially after she got them into an elite private school. But now her children are becoming elitist and judgmental, acquiring more attitude than education. So when she and her kids are invited to Amber Cove, an exclusive resort in Maine for wealthy blacks, Blanche jumps at the chance to see how the other half lives and maybe stop her kids turning into people she doesn't want to know.

Eve L. Ewing knows Chicago Public Schools from the inside: as a student, then a teacher, and now a scholar who studies them. And that perspective has shown her that public schools are not buildings full of failures - they're an integral part of their neighborhoods, at the heart of their communities, storehouses of history and memory that bring people together. Never was that role more apparent than in 2013 when Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced an unprecedented wave of school closings.

Every year in the great Temple City of Duvalpore, the image of the Wheel of the Infinite must be painstakingly remade to ensure another year of peace and harmony for the Celestial Empire. Every hundred years the sacred rite takes on added significance. For it is then that the very fabric of the world must be rewoven. Linked by the mystic energies of the Infinite, the Wheel and world are one. Should the holy image be marred, the world will suffer a similar injury. But a black storm is spreading across the Wheel.

Published in 1861, Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is an autobiographical account of the author's experiences as a slave in 19th-century North Carolina, from her relatively happy childhood to the brutality she experienced as a teenager and young woman to her eventual escape to the North.

In 1930s Mississippi, Mary Johnson hates the oppressive heat, working on her family farm, and having to attend her minister father's church several times a week. But she loves Mason Carter, her musician boyfriend. Both fantasize about living the high life up north in the big city. When William Bevers, a wealthy old preacher, comes to court her, he promises a life of luxury along with money and status for her family. Mary wants nothing to do with him, but her parents decide for her. Determined to avoid a forced marriage, Mary elopes with Mason to the bright lights of Chicago.

Growing up in a rapidly changing Harlem, eight-year-old Malaya hates when her mother drags her to Weight Watchers meetings. The pressures of her predominantly white Upper East Side prep school are relentless, as are the expectations passed down from her painfully proper mother and sharp-tongued grandmother. As she comes of age in the 1990s, she finds solace in the music of Biggie Smalls and Aaliyah, but her weight continues to climb—until a family tragedy forces her to face the source of her hunger, ultimately shattering her inherited stigmas and embracing her own desire.

City of Inmates explains how the City of Angels became the capital city of the world's leading incarcerator. Marshaling more than two centuries of evidence, historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez unmasks how histories of native elimination, immigrant exclusion, and Black disappearance drove the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles. In this telling, which spans from the Spanish colonial era to the outbreak of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, Hernandez documents the persistent historical bond between the racial fantasies of conquest and the eliminatory capacities of incarceration.

In the midst of our hectic, overscheduled lives, caring for the soul is imperative. Now, more than ever, we need to pause - intentionally - and encounter the Divine. Soul care director Barbara Peacock illustrates a journey of prayer, spiritual direction, and soul care from an African American perspective. She reflects on how these disciplines are woven into the African American culture and lived out in the rich heritage of its faith community.