Lisa Renee Pitts has narrated 56 audiobooks on Listento.it by 59 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.3★ across 589 ratings. The most-rated is Homefront: An Expeditionary Force Audio Drama Special.
Homefront: An Expeditionary Force Audio Drama Special
Summary
A full-cast performance of a thrilling new episode in the New York Times best-selling Expeditionary Force series. 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. Produced by Odd Origin Media and Dagaz Media Executive Producer Greg Lawrence Story by Craig Alanson Script by Craig Alanson and Jack Bowman Talent Director William Dufris Sound Director Fred Greenhalgh Associate Producer Casey Turner Dialogue edited by Jack Bowman Sound design by Jamie Mahaffey/The Mix Room and O'Shea Creative Media Music by Jeroen Grommen Check out exclusive bonus content at homefrontaudio.com. Full cast includes Zachary Quinto, R.C. Bray, Kate Mulgrew, Robert Picardo, Peter Berkrot, Kym Dakin, Bill Dufris, Corey Gagne, Nimo Gandhi, Emily Grotz, Dalton S. Kimball, Austin Ku, Daniel Logan, John Dalton Logan, PJ Ochlan, Lisa Renee Pitts, Christopher Price, Michael Rafkin, Lisa Stathoplos, Casey Turner, Jennywren Walker, Marjolaine Whittlesey, Ashanti Williams, Jonathan Woodward, and Collin Young.
©2019 Craig Alanson, Dagaz Media, LLC, and Odd Origin Media Inc. (P)2019 Podium Audio
Left to Tell
Summary
In 1994, Immaculee Ilibagiza's world was ripped apart when her native country of Rwanda descended into a bloody genocide. Her family was brutally murdered during a killing spree that lasted three months and claimed the lives of nearly a million Rwandans. Miraculously, Immaculee survived the slaughter. For 91 days, she and seven other women huddled silently together in the cramped bathroom of a local pastor while hundreds of machete-wielding killers hunted for them. It was during those endless hours of unspeakable terror that Immaculee forged a profound and lasting relationship with God. The triumphant story of this remarkable woman's journey through the darkness of genocide will inspire anyone whose life has been touched by fear, suffering, and loss.
©2006 Immaculee Ilibagiza and Steve Erwin (P)2006 Hay House
The Color of Money
Summary
When the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863, the black community owned less than one percent of the United States' total wealth. More than 150 years later, that number has barely budged. The Color of Money pursues the persistence of this racial wealth gap by focusing on the generators of wealth in the black community: black banks. The catch-22 of black banking is that the very institutions needed to help communities escape the deep poverty caused by discrimination and segregation inevitably became victims of that same poverty. Not only could black banks not "control the black dollar" due to the dynamics of bank depositing and lending but they drained black capital into white banks, leaving the black economy with the scraps. Mehrsa Baradaran challenges the long-standing notion that black banking and community self-help is the solution to the racial wealth gap. These initiatives have functioned as a potent political decoy to avoid more fundamental reforms and racial redress. Examining the fruits of past policies and the operation of banking in a segregated economy, she makes clear that only bolder, more realistic views of banking's relation to black communities will end the cycle of poverty and promote black wealth.
©2017 The President and Fellows of Harvard College (P)2017 Tantor
Every Little Step
Summary
In Every Little Step, Brown will for the first time tell the full story of his life and set the record straight, particularly about his relationship with Whitney Houston. Bobby Brown has been one of the most compelling American artists of the past 30 years, a magnetic and talented figure who successfully crossed over many musical genres, including R&B and hip-hop as well as the mainstream. In the late 1980s, the former front man of New Edition had a wildly successful solo career - especially with the launch of Don't Be Cruel - garnering multiple hits on the Billboard top 10 list as well as several Grammy, American Music, and Soul Train awards. But Brown put his career on hold to be with the woman he loved: American music royalty Whitney Houston. The marriage between Brown and Houston was perhaps the most closely watched and talked about marriage of the 1990s - a pairing that mesmerized the public and the gossip industry. Now, for the first time, the world will be able to hear the truth from the mouth of America's "bad boy" himself. Raw and powerful, Every Little Step is the story of a man who has been on the top of the mountain and in the depths of the valley and who is now finally ready to talk about his career and family life, from the passion and the excess to his creative inspirations and massive musical success. On the process of writing this book, Bobby says, "Right after I signed on to write my story, I went through one of the most agonizing traumas I had ever experienced with the death of my daughter. But I was surprised by how therapeutic it was to work on this project, to look at the entire arc of my life and to realize that although there has been considerable pain, I have also been incredibly blessed. I hope my fans and other listeners of this book will be entertained by this trip into the crazy, exciting, fascinating world of Bobby Brown. And I hope they will feel that I have been as honest and open with them in these pages as I have tried to be my entire life."
©2016 Bobby Brown (P)2016 HarperCollins Publishers
Successful Women Speak Differently
Summary
Stop underestimating yourself. You are capable of far more than you know. The most successful women are often not the most talented, the most gifted, or even the most experienced. What these women have is a knack for communicating that opens doors and gives them influence. Gleaning from powerful research, best-selling author and life strategist Valorie Burton unearths practical insights you can put to work in your life immediately. Scientific studies are proving what the ancient wisdom of Scripture has shown all along: The power of life and death lies in the very words you speak. Let Valorie teach you how to... Recognize the nuances in speech that can mean the difference between success and failure Increase your influence by changing what you think and say in critical moments Speak accurately about yourself so you don't sabotage your most meaningful goals Boost your confidence by making simple tweaks to your everyday speech Your words are powerful tools. It's time to use them to build the life you really want.
©2016 eChristian (P)2016 eChristian
Coming of Age in Mississippi
Summary
Audie Award Finalist, Classic, 2014 Born to a poor couple who were tenant farmers on a plantation in Mississippi, Anne Moody lived through some of the most dangerous days of the pre-civil rights era in the South. The week before she began high school came the news of Emmet Till's lynching. Before then, she had "known the fear of hunger, hell, and the Devil. But now there was…the fear of being killed just because I was black." In that moment was born the passion for freedom and justice that would change her life. An all-A student whose dream of going to college is realized when she wins a basketball scholarship, she finally dares to join the NAACP in her junior year. Through the NAACP and later through CORE and SNCC she has first-hand experience of the demonstrations and sit-ins that were the mainstay of the civil rights movement, and the arrests and jailings, the shotguns, fire hoses, police dogs, billy clubs, and deadly force that were used to destroy it. A deeply personal story but also a portrait of a turning point in our nation's destiny, this autobiography lets us see history in the making, through the eyes of one of the foot soldiers in the civil rights movement.
©1968 Anne Moody (P)2012 Tantor
Warriors Don't Cry
Summary
The landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling, Brown v. Board of Education, brought the promise of integration to Little Rock, Arkansas, but it was hard-won for the nine black teenagers chosen to integrate Central High School in 1957. They ran a gauntlet flanked by a rampaging mob and a heavily armed Arkansas National Guard-opposition so intense that soldiers from the elite 101st Airborne Division were called in to restore order. For Melba Beals and her eight friends those steps marked their transformation into reluctant warriors - on a battlefield that helped shape the civil rights movement. Warriors Don't Cry, drawn from Melba Beals's personal diaries, is a riveting true account of her junior year at Central High-one filled with telephone threats, brigades of attacking mothers, rogue police, fireball and acid-throwing attacks, economic blackmail, and, finally, a price upon Melba's head. With the help of her English-teacher mother; her eight fellow warriors; and her gun-toting, Bible-and-Shakespeare-loving grandmother, Melba survived. And, incredibly, from a year that would hold no sweet-sixteen parties or school plays, Melba Beals emerged with indestructible faith, courage, strength, and hope.
©1994 Melba Patillo Beals (P)2011 Tantor
Life in Motion
Summary
"Picture a ballerina in a tutu and toe shoes. What does she look like?" 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. When she discovered ballet, Misty was living in a shabby motel room, struggling with her five siblings for a place to sleep on the floor. A true prodigy, she was dancing en pointe within three months of taking her first dance class and performing professionally in just over a year: A feat unheard of for any classical dancer. But when Misty became caught between the control and comfort she found in the world of ballet and the harsh realities of her own life (culminating in a highly publicized custody battle), she had to choose to embrace both her identity and her dreams, and find the courage to be one of a kind. With an insider's unique point of view, Misty opens a window into the life of a professional ballerina who lives life center stage: From behind the scenes at her first auditions to her triumphant roles in some of the most iconic ballets. But in this beautifully written memoir, she also delves deeper to reveal the desire and drive that made her dreams reality. Life in Motion is a story of passion and grace for anyone who has dared to dream of a different life.
©2014 Misty Copeland (P)2014 Tantor
Wastelands
Summary
Famine, Death, War, and Pestilence - the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the harbingers of Armageddon - these are our guides through the Wastelands. From the Book of Revelation to The Road Warrior, from A Canticle for Leibowitz to The Road, storytellers have long imagined the end of the world, weaving eschatological tales of catastrophe, chaos, and calamity. In doing so, these visionary authors have addressed one of the most challenging and enduring themes of imaginative fiction: The nature of life in the aftermath of total societal collapse. Gathering together the best post-apocalyptic literature of the last two decades from many of today's most renowned authors of speculative fiction - including George R. R. Martin, Gene Wolfe, Orson Scott Card, Carol Emshwiller, Jonathan Lethem, Octavia E. Butler, and Stephen King - Wastelands explores the scientific, psychological, and philosophical questions of what it means to remain human in the wake of Armageddon. Whether the end of the world comes through nuclear war, ecological disaster, or cosmological cataclysm, these are tales of survivors, in some cases struggling to rebuild the society that was, in others, merely surviving, scrounging for food in depopulated ruins and defending themselves against monsters, mutants, and marauders. Wastelands delves into this bleak landscape, uncovering the raw human emotion and heart-pounding thrills at the genre's core.
©2008 John Joseph Adams (P)2014 Blackstone Audio
Sugar in the Blood
Summary
In the late 1630s, lured by the promise of the New World, Andrea Stuart's earliest known maternal ancestor, George Ashby, set sail from England to settle in Barbados. He fell into the life of a sugar plantation owner by mere chance, but by the time he harvested his first crop, a revolution was fully under way: the farming of sugar cane, and the swiftly increasing demands for sugar worldwide, would not only lift George Ashby from abject poverty and shape the lives of his descendants, but it would also bind together ambitious White entrepreneurs and enslaved Black workers in a strangling embrace. Stuart uses her own family story - from the 17th century to the present - as the pivot for this epic tale of migration, settlement, survival, slavery, and the making of the Americas. As it grew, the sugar trade enriched Europe as never before, financing the Industrial Revolution and fuelling the Enlightenment. It also became the basis of many economies in South America, played an important part in the evolution of the United States as a world power, and transformed the Caribbean into an archipelago of riches. But this sweet and hugely profitable trade - “white gold”, as it was known - had profoundly less palatable consequences in its precipitation of the enslavement of Africans to work the fields on the islands and, ultimately, throughout the American continents. Interspersing the tectonic shifts of colonial history with her family's experience, Stuart explores the interconnected themes of settlement, sugar, and slavery with extraordinary subtlety and sensitivity. In examining how these forces shaped her own family - its genealogy, intimate relationships, circumstances of birth, varying hues of skin - she illuminates how her family, among millions of others like it, in turn transformed the society in which they lived and how that interchange continues to this day. Shifting between personal and global history, Stuart gives us a deepened understanding of the connections between continents, between Black and White, between men and women, between the free and the enslaved. It is a story brought to life with riveting and unparalleled immediacy, a story of fundamental importance to the making of our world.
©2013 Andrea Stuart (P)2013 Tantor
Successful Women Think Differently
Summary
Popular author and professional certified coach Valorie Burton knows that successful women think differently. They make decisions differently. They set goals differently and bounce back from failure differently. Valorie is dedicated to help women create new thought processes that empower them to succeed in their relationships, finances, work, health, and spiritual life. With new, godly habits, women will discover how to: Focus on solutions, not problems Choose courage over fear Nurture intentional relationships Take consistent action in the direction of their dreams Build the muscle of self-control In this powerful and practical guide, Valorie provides a woman with insight into who she really is and gives her the tools, knowledge, and understanding to succeed.
©2016 eChristian (P)2016 eChristian
Grace
Summary
For a runaway slave in the 1840s South, life on the run can be just as dangerous as life under a sadistic master. That's what 15-year-old Naomi learns after she escapes the brutal confines of life on an Alabama plantation. Striking out on her own, she leaves behind her beloved Momma and sister, Hazel, and takes refuge in a Georgia brothel run by a freewheeling, gun-toting Jewish madam named Cynthia. There, amid a revolving door of gamblers, prostitutes, and drunks, Naomi falls into a star-crossed love affair with a smooth-talking white man named Jeremy who frequents the brothel's dice tables all too often. The product of Naomi and Jeremy's union is Josey, whose white skin and blonde hair mark her as different from the other slave children on the plantation. Having been taken in as an infant by a free slave named Charles, Josey has never known her mother, who was murdered at her birth. Josey soon becomes caught in the tide of history when news of the Emancipation Proclamation reaches the declining estate, and a day of supposed freedom quickly turns into a day of unfathomable violence that will define Josey - and her lost mother - for years to come. Deftly weaving together the stories of Josey and Naomi - who narrates the entire novel, unable to leave her daughter alone in the land of the living - Grace is a sweeping, intergenerational saga featuring a group of outcast women during one of the most compelling eras in American history. It is a universal story of freedom, love, and motherhood told in a dazzling and original voice and set against a rich and transporting historical backdrop.
©2016 Natashia Deón (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Blanche Among the Talented Tenth
Summary
The second, ground-breaking mystery featuring African-American maid and amateur sleuth Blanche White by Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity Award-winning author Barbara Neely. 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. When one of the guests kills himself, and another is electrocuted in her bathtub, Blanche becomes an accidental detective once again, using her sharp wit and keen social insight to peel back some disturbing color and class distinctions within the black community that may have driven someone to murder.
©2014 Barbara Neely (P)2019 Tantor
Blanche on the Lam
Summary
Blanche White is a plump, feisty, middle-aged African-American housekeeper working for the genteel rich in North Carolina. But when an employer stiffs her, and her checks bounce, she goes on the lam, hiding out as a maid for a wealthy family at their summer home. That plan goes awry when there's a murder and Blanche becomes the prime suspect. So she's forced to use her savvy, her sharp wit, and her old-girl network of domestic workers to discover the truth and save her own skin. Along the way, she lays bare the quirks of southern society with humor, irony, and a biting commentary that makes her one of the most memorable and original characters ever to appear in mystery fiction.
©1992 Barbara Neely (P)2017 Tantor
Other People's Children
Summary
Winner of an American Educational Studies Association Critics' Choice Award and Choice Magazine's Outstanding Academic Book Award, and voted one of Teacher Magazine's "great books", Other People's Children has sold over 150,000 copies since its original hardcover publication. This edition features a new introduction by Delpit, as well as new framing essays by Herbert Kohl and Charles Payne. In a radical analysis of contemporary classrooms, MacArthur Award-winning author Lisa Delpit develops ideas about ways teachers can be better "cultural transmitters" in the classroom, where prejudice, stereotypes, and cultural assumptions breed ineffective education. Delpit suggests that many academic problems attributed to children of color are actually the result of miscommunication, as primarily white teachers and "other people's children" struggle with the imbalance of power and the dynamics plaguing our system.
©2006 Lisa Delpit; individual essays copyright 2006 by each author (P)2016 Tantor
Cane
Summary
The Harlem Renaissance writer's innovative and groundbreaking novel depicting African American life in the South and North, with a foreword by National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree Zinzi Clemmons.... 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. While critically acclaimed and known today as a pioneering text of the Harlem Renaissance, the book did not gain as much popularity as other works written during the period. Fellow Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes believed Cane's lack of a wider readership was because it didn't reinforce the stereotypes often associated with African Americans during the time, but portrayed them in an accurate and entirely human way, breaking the mold and laying the groundwork for how African Americans are depicted in literature.
©2019 Foreword: Zinzi Clemmons (P)2019 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
You're the Only One I've Told
Summary
For a long time, when people asked Dr. Meera Shah what she did, she would tell them she was a doctor and leave it at that. But over the last few years, Shah decided it was time to be direct. "I'm an abortion provider," she will now say. And an interesting thing started to happen each time she met someone new. One by one, people would confide - at BBQs, at jury duty, in the middle of the greeting-card aisle at Target - that in fact they'd had an abortion themselves. And the refrain was often the same: You're the only one I've told. This book collects those stories as they've been told to Shah to humanize abortion and to combat myths that persist in the discourse that surrounds it. An intentionally wide range of ages, races, socioeconomic factors, and experiences shows that abortion does not happen in isolation - it always occurs in a unique context. Today, a health-care issue that's so foundational to reproductive, social, and economic freedom for millions of people is exploited by politicians who lack understanding or compassion about the context in which abortion occurs. Stories have power to break down stigmas and help us to empathize with those whose experiences are unlike our own. They can also help us find community and a shared sense of camaraderie over experiences just like ours. You're the Only One I've Told will do both.
©2020 Meera Shah (P)2020 Tantor
Ghosts in the Schoolyard
Summary
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. Pitched simultaneously as a solution to a budget problem, a response to declining enrollments, and a chance to purge bad schools that were dragging down the whole system, the plan was met with a roar of protest from parents, students, and teachers. But if these schools were so bad, why did people care so much about keeping them open? Ewing's answer begins with a story of systemic racism, inequality, bad faith, and distrust that stretches deep into Chicago history. Black communities see the closing of their schools - schools that are certainly less than perfect but that are theirs - as one more in a long line of racist policies. The fight to keep them open is yet another front in the ongoing struggle of black people in America to build successful lives and achieve true self-determination. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2018 The University of Chicago (P)2019 Tantor
Emptied
Summary
For a marriage that brims over Maybe you entered marriage with some pretty high expectations - most couples do. Jonathan and Wynter Pitts did. Until the reality of married life spilled into their expectations. Jonathan and Wynter invite you on a journey to explore a different approach to your happily-ever-after marriage. Join them for an honest look at the lessons learned as they navigated the ups and downs of early marriage while raising four daughters. Here you will: Be encouraged to remove the pressure of a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses marriage Learn to let go of assumptions and embrace your role as servant-leader to your spouse Experience how God can pour his purpose, passion, and fullness into your relationship Emptied is a way of life. It’s not about trying harder. It’s about thinking differently. Only when you are emptied of your own self-focused motivations can God pour new life into you for the abundant marriage and satisfying relationship you long for. Are you ready to approach your marriage poured out, ready to be filled up?
©2019 eChristian (P)2019 eChristian
The Hannah Anointing
Summary
In The Hannah Anointing, Michelle McClain-Walters reveals a special kind of spiritual power that stands unwaveringly in the face of recurring disappointment and the enemy's taunts. With her unique and empowering prophetic, McClain-Walters tackles issues women face on the road to their destiny and purpose, including how to: Release the cry of the barren, pray in faith, and get God's attention Overcome jealousy, rejection, temptation to compromise, critical spirits, and shame Find healing and purity of heart Get the right perspective of God's sovereignty and find strength to persevere These are the women who will see the promise of God in their lives and in generations to come.
©2019 Michelle McClain-Walters (P)2019 eChristian