Audiobooks by Marjory Wentworth

Notes from 1619: A Poetic 400-Year Reflection

Horace Mungin’s brave attempt to fight against the multiple manifestations of injustice imposed by the conscious erasure of African American history is in keeping with the best of contemporary African American literature. Mungin deftly imagines the horrors of the Middle Passage, taking us back to the Cape Coast of Africa and telling the story of Khadija, “born to a time of trouble,” who was captured, imprisoned and carried on the slave ship, Clotilda “to look upon the world/That dark day of the/Darkest days in America.” And so it begins, the narrative journey that sweeps through these poems describing the African experience in America, “in this vacuum where there is no God.” In the pivotal poem “America,” Mungin lays it all out for us, from the “hocus pocus” of the ways in which the Constitution did not apply to black people, to the failures of Reconstruction and all that follows, these poems weave our history together until the present day and the election of Donald Trump to the presidency. This is a narrative we’ve never heard told in quite this way, and it provides a context and an understanding long missing from our national conversation.

Horace Mungin, Marjory Wentworth (Author), Matt Jones (Narrator)

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We Are Charleston: Tragedy and Triumph at Mother Emanuel

"On June 17, 2015, at 9:05 p.m., a young man with a handgun opened fire on a prayer meeting at the Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Charleston, South Carolina, killing nine members of the congregation. The captured shooter, twenty-one-year-old Dylan Roof, a white supremacist, was charged with their murders. Two days after the shooting, while Roof’s court hearing was held on video conference, the families of his nine victims, one by one, appeared on the screen—forgiving the killer. The “Emanuel Nine” set a profound example for their families, their city, their nation, and indeed the world. We Are Charleston not only recounts the events of that terrible day but also offers a history lesson that reveals a deeper look at the suffering, triumph, and even the ongoing rage of the people who formed Mother Emanuel A.M.E. church and the wider denominational movement. In many ways, this church’s story is America’s story—the oldest A.M.E. church in the Deep South fighting for freedom and civil rights but also fighting for grace and understanding. Fighting to transcend bigotry, fraud, hatred, racism, poverty, and misery. The shootings in June 2015, opened up a deep wound of racism that still permeates Southern institutions and remains part of American society. We Are Charleston tells the story of a people, continually beaten down, who seem to continually triumph over the worst of adversity. Exploring the storied history of the A.M.E. Church may be a way of explaining the price and power of forgiveness, a way of revealing God’s mercy in the midst of tremendous pain. We Are Charleston may help us discover what can be right in a world that so often has gone wrong. "

Bernard Edward Powers Jr., Bernard Powers, Dr. Bernard Edward Powers Jr., Herb Frazier, Marjory Wentworth (Author), Barry Scott (Narrator)

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