Showing results by narrator "Dion Graham" in All Categories

Jackie is a poor boy from Harlem and the victim of abuse from his widowed, alcoholic father. But everything changes on the day he discovers the power of comedy. When his classmates make fun of his tattered clothes, Jackie turns everything around by freely poking fun at himself and soon has everyone on the floor with laughter. His amazing talent, and raging ambition, take him through the local club circuit to become the most sought after comedic entertainer in opulent, '50s Las Vegas and beyond.

All six of the Narwhal and Jelly books available as an audio collection!

Karen Lynn Williams "always takes [listeners] on a worthwhile journey" ( Booklist) with her critically acclaimed children’s tales. A Beach Tail follows a father and son during a magical day at the beach. After Gregory draws a lion in the sand, his father tells him to stay close to it and not to wander away. So Gregory, taking his father’s advice to heart, doesn’t dare leave his lion - even when he draws its tail so long it extends the length of the beach.

In "Master and Man," Bobbie is a black man who can outride, outfight, and outshoot any white man in the mountain desert. His unwavering moral code serves as a model for his often cruel and dissolute white master.

In profound, uplifting verse, beloved author Matt de la Peña explores the endless possibilities each child contains: A young dancer may grow into a computer coder; a basketball player might become a poet; a class clown may one day serve as an inspiring teacher; and today’s quiet empath might be tomorrow’s great leader. Here's a profound and uplifting new classic with an empowering message for listeners of all ages: Your story is still being written. 

Caryl Phillips has received international acclaim for his works, including the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, and membership in the Royal Society of Literature.

Dancing in the Dark brilliantly re-creates the life of Bert Williams, the first Black entertainer to achieve stardom in America. In 1896, when Bert decides to perform his stage routine in blackface, he is accused of reviling his race even as he becomes a star in Ziegfeld's Follies.

This original audio play is based on the life and writings of freed slave William Wells Brown. William’s Leap for Freedom is a two-part drama; a play within a play beginning with a fictionalized conversation between William Wells Brown and Mr. Polite. This audio drama then introduces Part Two of the play, which features selected portions of Well's The Escape or Leap for Freedom, as it relates to the tale of three slaves.

Dean Chance has a good job as a TV producer, and he is content with his longtime girlfriend, Millie. But in a chance encounter, he meets sleek, seductive Bee Cole. She pulls the conservative young man into a world of cybersex that is beyond anything he has imagined. Now, in a realm where anything is virtually possible, Dean has to decide where to draw the line.

At the age of 22, David Eggers became both an orphan and a "single mother" when his parents died within five months of one another of unrelated cancers. David is appointed unofficial guardian of his eight-year-old brother, Christopher. The two live together in semi-squalor, decaying food and sports equipment scattered about, while Eggers worries obsessively about child-welfare authorities, molesting babysitters, and his own health.

More bodies have washed up on the shores of a small island. Another over-filled, ill-equipped, dilapidated ship has sunk under the weight of its too-many passengers: Syrians, Ethiopians, Egyptians, Lebanese, Palestinians, all of them desperate to escape untenable lives in their homelands. And only one had made the passage: nine-year-old Amir, a Syrian boy who has the good fortune to fall into the hands not of the officials, but of Vänna, a teenage girl, native to the island, who lives inside her own sense of homelessness in a place and among people she has come to disdain.

In Pepperfish Keys, Darryl Wimberley introduces listeners to Barrett "Bear" Raines, a Black cop trying to win some respect in a very White town. When a shady senator's daughter is brutally murdered, Bear is assigned to the investigation. He's still bitter that the charges against the senator for money laundering were just thrown out for lack of evidence, and he's got a hunch about the girl's murderer. Allegations fly, and Bear's afraid this case will turn out just like the last one.

Baltimore, 2015. Riots are erupting across the city as citizens demand justice for Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old Black man who has died under suspicious circumstances while in police custody. Drug and violent crime are surging and Baltimore will reach its highest murder count in more than two decades: 342 homicides in a single year, in a city of just 600,000 people.

The father that the brothers shared was as elusive a figure for George as he had been for Barack Obama; he died when George was six months old and George was raised by his mother and stepfather. But after his mother and stepfather separated, he drifted into gangs and petty crime. Arrested for robbery, restless, willful, and troubled, he lost himself in Nairobi's vast Mathare ghetto. After being framed for an armed robbery he did not commit and spending time in jail, he represented himself at trial and won the case.

Amid the sparkle and hum of a New York City winter, Jed and his best friend, Flyer, are filming a documentary of their neighborhood. In the process, Jed confronts painful memories of his older brother, Zeke, a poet who loved jazzman Charlie "Bird" Parker and who died, leaving behind his CDs, a notebook, and a lot of unanswered questions.

Hidden beneath the floorboards in a house he's remodelling, Christopher Flynn discovers something very tempting - and troubling. Summoning every bit of maturity and every lesson he's learned the hard way, Chris leaves what he found where he found it and tells his job partner to forget it, too. Knowing trouble when he sees it - and walking the other way-is a habit Chris is still learning. Chris's father, Thomas Flynn, runs the family business where Chris and his friends have found work.

A thrilling, profoundly moving science fiction retelling of the Greek tragedy Antigone filled with inevitable doom, heart-break and one final act of courage. Outside the last city on Earth, the planet is a wasteland. Without the Archive, where the genes of the dead are stored, humanity will end.

From the award-winning author and illustrator of Before She Was Harriet comes an original and moving perspective of the Great Migration, as seen through the eyes of the young girl Ruth Ellen, whose family journeys from North Carolina to New York City.

Many readers still claim this haunting, atmospheric novel of Michael Ondaatje's as their first love—a novel as sensual and erotic today as ever it was. At the turn of the century, the Storyville district of New Orleans had some 2000 prostitutes, 70 professional gamblers, and 30 piano players. But it had only one man who played the cornet like Buddy Bolden—he who cut hair by day at N. Joseph's Shaving Parlor, and at night played jazz, unleashing an unforgettable wildness and passion in crowded rooms.

In lyrical, soul-searching free verse, the father-son team who presented Jazz, delivers a heartfelt and thought-provoking homage to this country. Reflective and non-judgmental, stretching across a tumultuous history and following dreams of and struggles for freedom, this masterful and stunning presentation of patriotism through poetry, quotations, and depictions of myriad Americans celebrates the heart and soul of this land.

Kidnapped for his brilliance, a 15-year-old electronics genius must fly deadly drones and fight as a sea-going pirate to keep his parents alive. Can he escape and also free his twin sister from the clutches of a major sex-trafficker? Earlier, he worked as a self-taught internet expert in the mega-city of Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, while his songbird sister aspired to be a rumba star. But, murderous gun-worshippers chloroformed him and whisked him away. Now, he must fight for the wrong side.