Anna Deavere Smith has narrated 2 audiobooks on Listento.it by 4 authors, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 2 ratings. The most-rated is The Bondwoman's Narrative.
The Bondwoman's Narrative
Summary
An unprecedented historical and literary event, this tale written in the 1850s is the only known novel by a female African American slave, and quite possibly the first novel written by a black woman anywhere. A work recently uncovered by renowned scholar and professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., it is a stirring tale of "passing" and the adventures of a young slave as she makes her way to freedom. The Bondwoman's Narrative tells of a self-educated young house slave who knows her life is limited by the brutalities of her society, but never suspects that the freedom of her plantation's beautiful new mistress is also at risk...or that a devastating secret will force them both to flee from slave hunters with another powerful, determined enemy at their heels. This program includes an exclusive interview with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
©2002 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., All Rights Reserved (P)2002 Time Warner AudioBooks, a Division of the AOL Time Warner Book Group
Notes from the Field
Summary
"Smith’s powerful style of living journalism uses the collective, cathartic nature of the theater to move us from despair toward hope.” (The Village Voice) Anna Deavere Smith’s extraordinary form of documentary theater shines a light on injustices by portraying the real-life people who have experienced them. "One of her most ambitious and powerful works on how matters of race continue to divide and enslave the nation.” (Variety) Smith renders a host of figures who have lived and fought the system that pushes students of color out of the classroom and into prisons. (As Smith has put it: “Rich kids get mischief, poor kids get pathologized and incarcerated.”) Using people’s own words, culled from interviews and speeches, Smith depicts Rev. Jamal Harrison Bryant, who eulogized Freddie Gray; Niya Kenny, a high school student who confronted a violent police deputy; activist Bree Newsome, who took the Confederate flag down from the South Carolina State House grounds; and many others. Their voices bear powerful witness to a great iniquity of our time - and call us to action with their accounts of resistance and hope.
©2019 Anna Deavere Smith (P)2019 Random House Audio