Pride Picks by Black Authors

How We Fight For Our Lives

By: Saeed Jones
Narrated by: Saeed Jones
Length: 5 hours 34 minutes

“This memoir by black and gay poet Saeed Jones is a visceral coming of age and coming out story. Growing up as an only child to his single mother in Texas and spending summers with his evangelical grandmother in Memphis, Jones struggles to come to terms with his sexuality, to come out of the closet, and to love himself. He wrestles with his... Read more

Real Life

A Novel

By: Brandon Taylor
Narrated by: Kevin R. Free
Length: 9 hours 25 minutes

A FINALIST for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the VCU/Cabell First Novelist Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the NYPL Young Lions Award, and the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award 
 
“A blistering coming of age story” —O: The Oprah Magazine

Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington... Read more

No Ashes in the Fire

Coming of Age Black and Free in America

By: Darnell L Moore
Narrated by: Darnell L Moore
Length: 6 hours

From a leading journalist and activist comes a brave, beautifully wrought memoir.

When Darnell Moore was fourteen, three boys from his neighborhood tried to set him on fire. They cornered him while he was walking home from school, harassed him because they thought he was gay, and poured a jug of gasoline on him. He escaped, but just barely. It... Read more

Sister Outsider

Essays and Speeches

Crossing Press Feminist

By: Audre Lorde
Narrated by: Robin Eller
Length: 7 hours 31 minutes

Presenting the essential writings of black lesbian poet and feminist writer Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider celebrates an influential voice in twentieth-century literature. In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action... Read more

All Boys Aren't Blue

A Memoir-Manifesto

By: George M. Johnson
Narrated by: George M. Johnson
Length: 5 hours 11 minutes

“Both a primer for teens eager to be allies, as well as a reassuring testimony for young queer men of color, All Boys Aren’t Blue covers topics such as gender identity, toxic masculinity, brotherhood, family, structural marginalization, consent and black joy. Johnson’s writing weaves together the trials and triumphs faced by black queer boys. If... Read more

Patsy

A Novel

By: Nicole Dennis-Benn
Narrated by: Sharon Gordon
Length: 17 hours 9 minutes

“I feel that Dennis-Benn is unparalleled in writing the insidious unforgivables. The mother who can't find love for her daughter, the more-than-friend who takes everything you give them and never gives back, the daughter told to be a "good girl" who finds difficulty doing either of those things for the woman who ends up raising her. Like her... Read more

Build Yourself a Boat

By: Camonghne Felix
Narrated by: Camonghne Felix
Length: 1 hour

This is about what grows through the wreckage. This is an anthem of survival and a look at what might come after. A view of what floats and what, ultimately, sustains.Build Yourself a Boat redefines the language of collective and individual trauma through lyric and memory. Read more

Lot

Stories

By: Bryan Washington
Narrated by: Bryan Washington, Dion Graham, JD Jackson & Bahni Turpin
Length: 5 hours 41 minutes

“This is such a phenomenal book by a writer who should be on everyone’s radar for 2019. Washington has a detailed and poignant style that reveals the tender soul within all of his characters. None of the characters that we meet in Lot are strangers — they are our mothers, brothers, lovers, and friends. Washington pulls them all together through... Read more

Don't Call Us Dead

Poems

By: Danez Smith
Narrated by: Danez Smith
Length: 1 hour 14 minutes

Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry



Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection



Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don't Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where... Read more

Girl, Woman, Other

By: Bernardine Evaristo
Narrated by: Anna-Maria Nabirye
Length: 11 hours 6 minutes

“The twelve Black British women who are the central characters in Bernardine Evaristo's GIRL, WOMAN, OTHER are so vastly different that when their connections are slowly revealed, like a spider web you didn't see until the light hits it just so, you'll settle in and become entranced. I loved this deep dive into a part of British culture that... Read more

Here for It

Or, How to Save Your Soul in America; Essays

By: R. Eric Thomas
Narrated by: R. Eric Thomas
Length: 7 hours 34 minutes

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Read with Jenna Book Club Pick as Featured on Today • From the creator of Elle’s “Eric Reads the News,” a heartfelt and hilarious memoir-in-essays about growing up seeing the world differently, finding unexpected hope, and experiencing every awkward, extraordinary stumble along the way.

“Pop culture–obsessed, Sedaris-level... Read more

Wow, No Thank You.

Essays (Lambda Literary Award)

By: Samantha Irby
Narrated by: Samantha Irby
Length: 10 hours 3 minutes

A new rip-roaring essay collection from the smart, edgy, hilarious, unabashedly raunchy, and bestselling Samantha Irby.

Irby is forty, and increasingly uncomfortable in her own skin despite what Inspirational Instagram Infographics have promised her. She has left her job as a receptionist at a veterinary clinic, has published successful books and... Read more

Felix Ever After

By: Kacen Callender
Narrated by: Logan Rozos
Length: 8 hours 23 minutes

“Captivating own voices story about finding your identity and love. Read more

An Unkindness of Ghosts

By: Rivers Solomon
Narrated by: Cherise Boothe
Length: 11 hours 53 minutes

“This book was haunting, horrifying, disturbing, dark, but so, so good. The character’s voices were so specific and clear, the relationships so clearly affected by circumstance and yet loving in the ways they could be. I loved that almost none of the characters in this book were hopeful idealists. Lots, if not most, of the actions of dissent they... Read more

The Tradition

By: Jericho Brown
Narrated by: JD Jackson
Length: 59 minutes

Jericho Brown's daring new book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown's poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? Brown makes... Read more

Red at the Bone

A Novel

By: Jacqueline Woodson
Narrated by: Jacqueline Woodson, Quincy Tyler Bernstine, Peter Francis James, Shayna Small & Bahni Turpin
Length: 3 hours 52 minutes

“Although you can read Jacqueline Woodson’s newest novel over the course of one evening, there is nothing breezy about the richness of its story, nothing short about the depth of its characters, nothing quick about the way this book stays with you after you finish reading. Told through five distinct voices, Red at the Bone tracks an... Read more

The Black Flamingo

By: Dean Atta
Narrated by: Dean Atta
Length: 3 hours 40 minutes

“Michael is a mixed-race gay teen growing up in London who goes to college and can't find a place to fit in, until he discovers The Drag Society. This story, told in poetry, is full of stunning language and the joy of finding your place in the world. Read more

Freshwater

By: Akwaeke Emezi
Narrated by: Akwaeke Emezi
Length: 6 hours 42 minutes

An extraordinary debut novel, Freshwater explores the surreal experience of having a fractured self. It centers around a young Nigerian woman, Ada, who develops separate selves within her as a result of being born "with one foot on the other side." Unsettling, heartwrenching, dark, and powerful, Freshwater is a sharp evocation of a rare way of... Read more

The Stars and the Blackness Between Them

By: Junauda Petrus
Narrated by: Junauda Petrus, Bahni Turpin & JD Jackson
Length: 9 hours 20 minutes

A Coretta Scott King Honor Book

Told in two distinct and irresistible voices, Junauda Petrus's bold and lyrical debut is the story of two black girls from very different backgrounds finding love and happiness in a world that seems determined to deny them both.

Port of Spain, Trinidad. Sixteen-year-old Audre is despondent, having just found out... Read more

Looking for Lorraine

The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry

By: Imani Perry
Narrated by: LisaGay Hamilton
Length: 8 hours 26 minutes

Winner of the 2019 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography

Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction

Winner of the Shilts-Grahn Triangle Award for Lesbian Nonfiction

Winner of the 2019 Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award

A New York Times Notable Book of 2018

A revealing portrait of one of the most gifted and charismatic, yet... Read more