A multi-generational activist family. A Black gay man who found a home in fashion. A poet’s reflection on the interplay between her breakup, and the perception of reality itself.
These newly released memoirs written by—and, in most cases, narrated by—Black authors, are wholly singular while simultaneously addressing common themes of intersectionality, love and community, and the space where personal meets political. Each perspective offered within these audiobook memoirs is as unique as each author’s walk of life.
When Breonna Taylor was killed, her police report was virtually blank. Feeling as if she was suffocating in the silence, anti-racism educator and activist Faitth Brooks wondered, “Would the world care about and remember me if I was killed?” In Remember Me Now, which is part manifesto, part love letter to Black women, Faitth grapples with this answer, charting the story of her activist grandparents and ancestors, as well as chronicling her own journey as the first-generation suburbs kid who becomes an activist and organizer herself.
When Edward Enninful became the first Black editor-in-chief of British Vogue, few in the world of fashion wanted to confront how it failed to represent the world we live in. But Edward rapidly changed that, and has since cemented his status as one of his world’s most important changemakers. In A Visible Man, Edward shares how as a Black, gay, working-class refugee, he found the freedom to share the world as he saw it.
In The Black Period, acclaimed poet Hafizah Augustus Geter creates a space for the beauty of Blackness, Islam, disability, and queerness to flourish, celebrating the many layers of her existence that America has time and again sought to erase in this groundbreaking memoir, combining lyrical prose and biting criticism.
When Camonghne Felix goes through a monumental breakup, everything shows up in the tapestry of her healing. In this raw reflection, Felix repossesses herself through the exploration of history she’d left behind, using her Dyscalculia—a disorder that makes it difficult to learn math—as a metaphor for her miscalculations in love, and negotiates the misalignments of perception and reality, love and harm, and the politics of heartbreak.
When Bozoma Saint John’s husband, Peter, died of cancer, she made one big decision: to live life urgently. Bozoma was no stranger to adversity, having grieved a child born prematurely–a process that led to her and Peter’s separation. When Peter knew his cancer was terminal, he gave Bozoma a short list of things to do: cancel the divorce, and fix the wrongs immediately. In The Urgent Life, Bozoma takes listeners through the dizzying, numbing days of multiple griefs, and the courage which these sparked in her to live life in accordance with her deepest values time and time again.
In 1955, Emmett Till was lynched when he was fourteen years old. That remains an undisputed fact. Yet the rest of the details surrounding the event remain distorted by time and too many tellings. A Few Days Full of Trouble is a powerful work of truth-telling set against a backdrop of reporting errors and manipulations, racial reckoning, and political pushback from Reverend Wheeler Parker Jr., Emmett Till’s cousin, best friend, and a survivor of the night of terror when young Emmett was taken from his home.
Amplify your playlist, and browse our Amplify Black Voices Collections.