Showing results by narrator "Carmen Jones" in All Categories

The linked stories in Mama Said are set in Louisville, Kentucky, a city with a rich history steeped in tobacco, bourbon, and gambling, indulgences that can quickly become gripping and destructive vices. Set amid the tail end of the crack epidemic and the rise of the opioid crisis, Mama Said evokes Black family life in all its complexity, following JayLynn, along with her cousins Zaria and Angel, as they come of age struggling against their mothers' drug addictions.

Langston Keith has been my brother's best friend for years, and he's always seen me as the competition. We're both race horse owners, and there's no way I'm letting Langston get that trophy. When my parents threaten to set me up in an arranged marriage with a guy in India, I beg Langston to fake date me to get them off my back. He agrees, and all goes well until the romance starts to feel real.

Serafina has a secret dream. She wants to go to school and become a doctor with her best friend, Julie Marie. But in their rural village outside Port-au-Prince, Haiti, many obstacles stand in Serafina's way - little money, never-ending chores, and Manman's worries. More powerful even than all of these are the heavy rains and the shaking earth that test Serafina's resolve in ways she never dreamed. At once heartbreaking and hopeful, this exquisitely crafted story will leave a lasting impression on your heart.

In Upper Hand, celebrated founder and CEO of The Plug, Sherrell Dorsey, delivers a personal and eye-opening exploration of how to ensure that marginalized communities aren't left behind as technology continues its inexorable march forward. In the book, listeners will learn to think about how we can strategically shape the coming decade to include Black and Brown communities. Upper Hand offers guidelines, insights, and frameworks for navigating the new world of work that is dominated by Silicon Valley-rooted technologies, inaccessible networks, and constant automation.

After suffering a mental breakdown that nearly destroyed her marriage, Nina Taylor works hard to maintain her tenuous hold on sanity and be a good mother to her two young daughters. Despite her best efforts, she questions the possibility of a full recovery.

Birdie Boucher is a woman who lives her life in the shadows of her infamous mother. A powerful voodoo priestess of the south who uses magic to wreak havoc on the lives of anyone who gets in her way. And any woman she believes is the lover of her philandering husband.

Rule number one for Bailey Westmoreland: Never fall for a man who would take her away from her tight-knit family's Colorado home. So why is she following rancher Walker Rafferty all the way to Alaska? When Tessa Noble takes the stage at a charity auction after a sexy makeover, her best friend, Ryan Bateman, must place the winning bid. It's definitely not because he's jealous. Their weekend getaway is a ploy for positive press…or so the rancher tells himself.

When Tessa Noble takes the stage at a charity auction after a sexy makeover, her best friend Ryan Bateman must place the winning bid. It's definitely not because he's jealous. Their weekend getaway is a ploy for positive press… or so the rancher tells himself. But soon things take an unexpected turn from platonic to passionate, catapulting the couple from friends to lovers….

At thirty-six, undefeated rodeo champion AJ Garza is supposed to be retiring, not chasing after an all-new closed-circuit rodeo tour with a million-dollar prize. But with the Houston rodeo program that saved him as a wayward teen on the brink of bankruptcy, he'll enter. And he'll win. Enter Lilian Sorrow Island. Raised by her grandparents on the family ranch in Muskogee, OK, Lil is more a cowboy than city boy AJ will ever be. It shows. She's not about to let him steal the prize that'll save her ranch, even if he is breathtakingly magnificent, in pretty much every way going.

All famous mystery author Stanton Black wanted was to leave the flashbulbs of Hollywood behind. Hiding out in the wilds of northeast Oregon seemed like the perfect way to get over an attempt on his life while researching his work. His latest novel would draw on the history of his ancestors and the lore of gold country. Now, all he needed was a suitable tour guide. Special education teacher Maya Valentine was no tour guide. After the death of her parents, Maya has come home to Salisbury Junction for the summer only to have an ailing friend talk her into escorting Stanton around the area.

Sisters Macey Lee Baker and Betsy Marie Cotter, along with Little Buddy and Marti Dog, the two furry friends, are tangled in another mystery. They are asked by the local historian to try and solve a mystery surrounding the old 1840s post office building next door to the café owned and operated by Macey Lee. Enter Sterling Hopewell, awaiting his death sentencing for that crime he committed when he was just a teenager in the nearby community of Mountain Rose, Ohio, in 1954....

In 1999, Macey Lee Baker is a real estate saleswoman in Capwater, Florida; happy in her Christian faith and in her marriage to her husband, Kyle. She's many miles and a lifetime away from her impoverished, rural upbringing in the farming community of Mountain Rose, Ohio. But when Macey Lee's sister Betsy suggests they go back to Ohio to visit siblings, a terrible memory surfaces…the death of their 10-year-old brother Jeremy back in 1954. And with that memory comes another long-buried thought…that their brother's death was no accident.

What is going on in this small Florida fishing village of Capwater located on a seaport? A petite, young classy lady, Darla Starr has just opened her real estate brokerage, Starr Port Realty, as a hurricane has just veered away from the little fishing village. A month later she is planning her grand opening with much excitement when she receives a mysterious letter and a phone call before going home for the night. Now frightened, she leaves her office to go to the safety of her seaside home but her vehicle will not start.

This is the story of Willow 'Twig' Olsen, a woman of Scandinavian descent, who was trapped into an existence of traditional servitude for the first 38 years of her life, and what transpires after her last parent dies, and she is finally free to seek male companionship, as she has long desired. What happens thereafter is a whirlwind of unexpected events that lead to greed, deception, and eventually murder.

From a vivid portrait of her childhood in 1960s Detroit to her leadership of one of the world’s largest philanthropic institutions, La June shares her full-circle, American story—a coming-of-age journey where she gains a firsthand understanding of how systemic racism prevents our children and communities from thriving and learns about the transformative role healing can play in helping all of us transcend the legacy of racial inequity.

“As far as I know, you can only die once…” But when Aetna Simmons disappears from her lonely Bermuda cottage, she leaves behind not one but ten suicide notes. Ten different suicide notes. And no other trace to speak of, not even a corpse, as if she’d never existed. Drafts of a Suicide Note is the darkly enigmatic love letter of Kenji Okada-Caines, a petty criminal who once exposited on English literary classics and now, marooned on his native isle, nurtures an obsession with Aetna’s writing.

When Renee McClendon was a teenager, she made a list of all the qualities her perfect man would have, but no matter how many handsome guys have ticked the boxes, she has yet to find the man for her. She wants a regular guy who's not afraid to get his hands dirty, and she's given herself a deadline. If she doesn't find Mr. Right by New Year's, she's done searching.

Coming from a troubled youth, Morgan Faraday grabs every opportunity to up-level her life. So she definitely plans to keep oil-company heir Sebastian Reid interested...all the way to the altar. He’s brilliant and supportive and is turning his billion-dollar company green to make up for his ancestors’ exploitation. With him, Morgan can have love, money, and the power to make the world better. And securing her future is far more important than the attractive environmental activist she suddenly has unexpected feelings for...

Jennifer McClendon is in need of a vacation. What better place to get away from everything than a sun-drenched tropical island? And there's no better way to get over her ex and have some fun than to spend a little time with a handsome software engineer who's also on holiday. What could it hurt? They won't see each other again anyway.

This is the story of Dr. Geneva Smitherman, aka "Dr. G," the pioneering linguist often referred to as the "Queen of Black Language." In a series of narrative essays, Dr. G writes eloquently and powerfully about the role of language in social transformation and the academic, intellectual, linguistic, and societal debates that shaped her groundbreaking work as a Black Studies O.G. and a Womanist scholar-activist of African American Language.