Showing results by narrator "Janina Edward" in All Categories

As a first grader, Ruby Bridges was the first Black student to integrate William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, Louisiana. This was no easy task, especially for a six-year-old. Ruby's bravery and perseverance inspired children and adults alike to fight for equality and social justice. Perfect for back-to-school listening!

Considered the fastest woman of all time, Florence Griffith Joyner, also known as Flo Jo, set two world records in 1988 that still stand today. But getting there wasn't easy, and Flo Jo had to overcome many challenges along the way.

In this chapter book biography by award-winning author Lesa Cline-Ransome, listeners learn about the amazing life of Claudette Colvin - and how she persisted. Before Rosa Parks famously refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin made the same choice. She insisted on standing up - or in her case, sitting down - for what was right, and in doing so, fought for equality, fairness, and justice.

Big hats, big trucks, big oil fortunes — Texas clichés all. And while those elements do flourish throughout Texas, they alone hardly define the place. The Lone Star State is and has always been a great melting pot, home to sprawling cities, trailblazing innovators, and treasured traditions from all over, many of which become ingrained in popular culture and intertwined with the American ideal.

Meet Nikki Holden - she may know 140 characters, but social media is not her venue. She's an investigative reporter with more enemies than friends - and her friends are very shady. She's on the trail of a stunning story at Pleasure Island. And she doesn't mind using her pickpocket talents or a well-aimed champagne cork or even a pair of 38s (boobs, not guns) to get her story. She's tenacious, sarcastic, and an ex-con. Meet Roman Cantrell - ex-army ranger who couldn't stop fighting, he went off the grid doing Black Ops but came back to the US to start an international security firm.

Punishment Without Crime offers an urgent new interpretation of inequality and injustice in America by examining the paradigmatic American offense: the lowly misdemeanor. Based on extensive original research, legal scholar Alexandra Natapoff reveals the inner workings of a massive petty offense system that produces over 13 million cases each year.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina and on the eve of a national recession, New York Times writer Dan Barry launched a column about America: not the one populated only by cable-news pundits, but the America defined and redefined by those who clean the hotel rooms, tend the beet fields, endure disasters both natural and manmade. As the name of the president changed from Bush to Obama to Trump, Barry was crisscrossing the country, filing deeply moving stories from the tiniest dot on the American map to the city that calls itself the Capital of the World.

Long before she was one of the Little Rock Nine, Melba Pattillo Beals was a warrior. Frustrated by the laws that kept African Americans separate but very much unequal to whites, she had questions: Why couldn't she drink from a whites-only fountain? Why couldn't she feel safe beyond home - or even within the walls of church? Adults all told her: Hold your tongue. Be patient. Know your place. But Beals had the heart of a fighter - and the knowledge that her true place was a free one.

Nevertheless We Persisted is a special audio-first anthology of poems, essays, and stories that explores themes of loss, love, and finding your own power. It's an astonishing collection filled with heart, tears, laughter, and ultimately hope. This collection was created from writers across the United States and also in Australia, England, India, and New Zealand. Each piece is performed by a talented narrator.

From the time Brooke Green was seven years old, she has lived with the pain of losing her mother. Her father has done the best job he could in raising her, but a piece of her always felt empty. On the day of her father's funeral, her grandmother breaks the shocking news: Her mother, Sarah, is very much alive. She abandoned her family because she claimed she wasn't fit for motherhood. After doing some research, Brooke discovers her mother is living in Atlanta, enjoying a great career...and a brand-new family.

Stars are dying, the sky is darkening, an alien race has inhabited the planet, and Irene and Jean sit by the pond at their nursing home every day, waiting for the world to end. Here the two elderly friends will learn more than they ever could have anticipated - about the world, about what it means to be different, and about each other.

Lauren Robinson knows exactly what it takes to be the perfect mistress. She had a front-row seat when she tagged along with her father on all of his extramarital trysts. She loved keeping Daddy's special secrets, but many family members, especially her mother, consider her an accomplice in helping break up their family. This emotional distance and Lauren's early dating experiences lead her to date married men.

Twenty-eight-year-old Kendra Clayton never quite broke out of her hometown of Willow, Ohio. She works part-time as a GED instructor and beefs up her income by hostessing at her uncle's restaurant, soaking up the local gossip. It's a quiet life, but Kendra hasn't given up hope that one day Mr. Right will walk through the door. In the meantime, her sleepy hollow is about to get a rude awakening, and Kendra is about to get some excitement - though it's not quite what she had in mind.

Goldstene uses a biographical approach to focus on key figures along a spectrum of political belief as they struggled to reconcile the inherent contradictions of equal opportunity. The Struggle for America's Promise includes such figures as Booker T. Washington, Samuel Gompers, Edward Bellamy, and Emma Goldman, who were more willing to step beyond the boundaries of the discourse about opportunity and question economic competition itself.

Set in San Francisco and North Carolina, the linked stories in Damn Love introduce us to characters struggling with love in all its complicated forms, including a young doctor getting over a breakup with the help of a patient, a newly married gay man who reconnects with his estranged mother, a trio of physicists caught in a surprising love triangle, and a soldier who takes secrets with her to the Iraqi desert.

Sam Brennan has lost everything. Pushed past the breaking point, his solitary goal is to seek vengeance against the people responsible for robbing him of everyone he's ever loved. Molly Flynn is a single mom and a paramedic whose shameful secret has her avoiding intimate relationships. When her brother shows up at her back door with an injured friend, tending to the angry man's gunshot wounds is the last thing she wants to do, but there's something about Sam that touches Molly's heart.

When Laila James, self-proclaimed "Golden Goddess," sets her sights on Marcus and shops a reality show based on their affair - and then a dangerous stalker threatens his family - Vanessa turns to her best friend Nia to save her marriage and her life.

Yoga For The Beginner: The Starter Guide is the text that you must have if you are seeking the best way to achieve inner peace and to get the body back in balance. The book explains what yoga is and it also gives some great poses that the reader can try to see if yoga would be something for them. The great thing about yoga is that persons that have a debilitating disease like arthritis can do it as it is a great form of low impact exercise.

It is 1848. On one side of the Mason-Dixon Line lives fifteen-year-old Willow, her master’s favorite servant. She’s been taught to read and has learned to write. She is permitted to spend much of her time riding her horse to the riverbank, where she writes letters to her dead mother. On the other side of the line is seventeen-year-old Cato, a black man, free born. It’s his personal mission to sneak as many fugitive slaves to freedom as he can. When Willow’s and Cato’s lives intersect, they will discover the true meanings of bondage and freedom, of family and love.

From African American to Asian American, indigenous to immigrant, "multiracial" to "mixedblood," the diversity of cultures in this world is matched only by the diversity of stories explaining our cultural origins: stories of creation and destruction, displacement and heartbreak, hope and mystery.