Audiobooks narrated by Korey Jackson

Victory. Stand!: Raising My Fist for Justice

On October 16, 1968, during the medal ceremony at the Mexico City Olympics, Tommie Smith, the gold medal winner in the 200-meter sprint, and John Carlos, the bronze medal winner, stood on the podium in black socks and raised their black-gloved fists to protest racial injustice inflicted upon African Americans. Both men were forced to leave the Olympics, received death threats, and faced ostracism and continuing economic hardships. In his first-ever memoir for young readers, Tommie Smith looks back on his childhood growing up in rural Texas through to his stellar athletic career, culminating in his historic victory and Olympic podium protest. Cowritten with Newbery Honor and Coretta Scott King Author Honor recipient Derrick Barnes, Victory. Stand! paints a stirring portrait of an iconic moment in Olympic history that still resonates today. Winner of the 2023 YALSA Excellence in Young Adult Nonfiction Award • Finalist for the 2022 National Book Award for Young People's Literature • A Coretta Scott King Award Author and Illustrator Honor Book • A Washington Post Best Book of the Year • A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year • A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year • A School Library Journal Best Book of the Year • A Booklist Best Book of the Year • A Horn Book Fanfare Title With bonus exclusive interviews with Tommie Smith and Derrick Barnes

Derrick Barnes, Tommie Smith (Author), Korey Jackson (Narrator)

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Coach Prime: Deion Sanders and the Making of Men

An exclusive insider account with unprecedented access to Deion Sanders, his staff, and players, who are shattering expectations weekly and changing the culture of college football. 'At Colorado in his new role as head coach, Coach Prime's mission remained the same [as it was at Jackson State]: turn boys into men and win football games, and ultimately, championships.' (from Coach Prime) 'You won't find a more competitive person than Coach Prime. At Jackson State, he wanted to dominate and win.... Nothing has changed but the address. He wants to dominate and win a national championship at Colorado.' (from Coach Prime) Known for decades as one of the NFL’s most iconic and spectacular playmakers, Deion Sanders remains college football's most intriguing newsmaker. In just three years, he has become the most talked about coach by recruiting elite players to moribund programs and reviving the spirit and pride of forgotten fanbases by winning. Along the way, he’s changing how we think about college sports while rejuvenating whole communities with the national attention that follows him and the fresh commerce a winning culture ignites. First at Jackson State and now at Colorado, Sanders has displayed a knack for leading miraculous turnarounds of once-storied-but-long-irrelevant programs. Television cameras turn up for national broadcasts, gameday attendance skyrockets, economic impact reaches the tens of millions, and NFL scouts take renewed interest. Meanwhile, off the field, Sanders displays an uncanny ability to connect with his players. Weekly chat sessions about life and love are the norm. His unyielding commitment to guiding his players to become exceptional men raises the bar on what parents and athletes expect from college coaches. Now, with access no other reporter has been granted, veteran sports journalist Jean-Jacques Taylor takes readers inside one season with Deion Sanders to show the heart, mind, and culture of America's most innovative football coach and his team of would-be champions.

Jean-Jacques Taylor (Author), Korey Jackson (Narrator)

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Barkley: A Biography

*A LitHub Most Anticipated Book of 2022* The definitive biography of Charles Barkley, exploring his early childhood, his storied NBA career, and his enduring legacy as a provocative voice in American pop culture He's one of the most interesting American athletes in the past fifty years. Passionate, candid, iconoclastic, and gifted both on and off the court, Charles Barkley has made a lasting impact on not only the world of basketball but pop culture at large. Yet few people know the real Charles. Raised by his mother and grandmother in Leeds, Alabama, he struggled in his early years to fit in until he found a sense of community and purpose in basketball. In the NBA he went toe-to-toe with the biggest legends in the game, from Magic to Michael to Hakeem to Shaq. But in the years since, he has become a bold agitator for social change, unafraid to grapple, often brashly, with even the thorniest of cultural issues facing our nation today. Informed by over 370 original interviews and painstaking research, Timothy Bella's Barkley is the most comprehensive biography to date of one of the most talked-about icons in the world of sports. Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

Timothy Bella (Author), Korey Jackson (Narrator)

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Whiteout

Atlanta is blanketed with snow just before Christmas, but the warmth of young love just might melt the ice in this novel of interwoven narratives, Black joy, and cozy, sparkling romance—by the same unbeatable team of authors who wrote the New York Times bestseller Blackout! As the city grinds to a halt, twelve teens band together to help a friend pull off the most epic apology of her life. But will they be able to make it happen, in spite of the storm? No one is prepared for this whiteout. But then, we can’t always prepare for the magical moments that change everything. From the bestselling, award-winning, all-star authors who brought us Blackout—Dhonielle Clayton, Tiffany D. Jackson, Nic Stone, Angie Thomas, Ashley Woodfolk, and Nicola Yoon—comes another novel of Black teen love, each relationship within as unique and sparkling as Southern snowflakes.

Angie Thomas, Ashley Woodfolk, Dhonielle Clayton, Nic Stone, Nicola Yoon, Tiffany D Jackson, Tiffany D. Jackson (Author), Alaska Jackson, Bahni Turpin, Danielle Shemaiah, James Fouhey, Joniece Abbott-Pratt, Kevin R. Free, Korey Jackson, Shayna Small (Narrator)

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That Bird Has My Wings: The Autobiography of an Innocent Man on Death Row

OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK 2022 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 'When I think about the fact that society, a nation, has sentenced me to death, all I can do is turn inside myself, to the place in my heart that wants so desperately to feel human, still connected to this world, as if I have a purpose.' The moving memoir of a Death Row inmate who discovers Buddhism and becomes an inspirational role model for fellow inmates, guards, and a growing public. In 1990, while serving a sentence in San Quentin for armed robbery, Jarvis Jay Masters was implicated as an accessory in the murder of a prison guard. A 23-year-old Black man, Jarvis was sentenced to death in the gas chamber. While in the maximum security section of Death Row, using the only instrument available to him—a ball-point pen filler—Masters's astounding memoir is a testament to the tenacity of the human spirit and the talent of a fine writer. Offering us scenes from his life that are at times poignant, revelatory, frightening, soul-stirring, painful, funny and uplifting, That Bird Has My Wings tells the story of the author’s childhood with parents addicted to heroin, an abusive foster family, a life of crime and imprisonment, and the eventual embracing of Buddhism. Masters’s story drew the attention of luminaries in the world of American Buddhism, including Pema Chodron, who wrote a story about him for O Magazine and offers a foreword to the book. Thirty-two years after his conviction, Masters is still on Death Row. A growing movement of people believe Masters is innocent, and are actively working within the legal system to free him.

Jarvis Jay Masters (Author), Korey Jackson (Narrator)

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Race and Reckoning: From Founding Fathers to Today’s Disruptors

Spanning from the nation’s earliest years through the New Deal to the Covid pandemic, a groundbreaking work that interrogates how pivotal decisions have established and continued discriminatory practices in the United States, even as the rise of disinformation and other modern advertising techniques have plunged democracy into an ever-deepening crisis. Throughout our nation’s history, numerous racialized decisions have solidified the fates of generations of citizens of color. Some of the earliest involved race-based slavery, the removal of Indigenous peoples from their lands, and the exclusion of most Asians. More have proliferated over time. While America grew into a superpower in the twentieth century, it continued to discriminate against people of color—both soldiers who served overseas and civilians on the home front, herding Japanese Americans into internment camps during World War II and denying Black citizens their right to vote. American Politicians have waxed eloquently and endlessly about bettering the nation. But bettering it for whom? journalist and cultural commentator Ellis Cose asks. From Reconstruction to the New Deal to the unceasing fight for civil rights, Cose reveals how the hopes of many Americans for a true multicultural democracy have been repeatedly frustrated by white nationalists skilled at weaponizing racial anxieties of other whites. In Race and Reckoning Cose dissects chapter-by-chapter how America’s overall narrative breeds racial resentment rooted in conjecture over fact. Through rigorous research and with astute detail, Cose uncovers how, at countless points in history, America’s leaders have upheld a narrative of American greatness rooted in racism. It is a story grounded in history, and it demolishes the myths that ultimately allowed one of the most ill-prepared, unethical, vindictive, and truth-challenged politicians in history to position himself as America’s savior by tapping into the nation’s darkest tendencies. Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

Ellis Cose (Author), Korey Jackson (Narrator)

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Primeval Fire

In the final riveting installment of C. T. Rwizi’s Scarlet Odyssey series, Salo’s death leaves his friends reeling—and a magical world in turmoil. Salo is dead—and the world he left behind is at war. In the midst of their grief, Salo’s closest clan members begin to experience strange phenomena: visions visit one, while seizures plague another. The clan’s new mystic divines that an arcane signal from the far west is calling, so they set out toward the desert—and encounter a caravan of travelers following the same mysterious call. Meanwhile, Salo’s loyal allies Ilapara and Tuk embark on a bold mission to raise Salo from the dead. And their sorcery works…or seems to. While the resurrected Salo ignores his friends’ warnings and forms dark alliances, Ilapara and Tuk struggle with their growing unease, even as they follow Salo westward on a quest in which the fate of the world hangs in the balance. With magic spiraling into mayhem, is this the end of Salo’s saga—or an epic new beginning?

C. T. Rwizi (Author), A.J. Beckles, James Shippy, Jordan Cobb, Korey Jackson, Susan Dalian (Narrator)

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Alabama v. King: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Criminal Trial That Launched the Civil Rights Moveme

The forgotten story of a criminal trial that brought national attention to a young defendant named Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as told by Fred D. Gray, Dr. King's lawyer and friend, along with New York Times bestselling authors Dan Abrams and David Fisher. The audiobook concludes with an exclusive conversation between Fred Gray and Dan Abrams. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested when she refused to give up her seat to a white man on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. After years of mistreatment on public buses, the African American community organized a bus boycott. Eighty-nine people were indicted for violating the city's anti-boycott statute. But rather than putting each of them on trial, the prosecutors chose to make an example of just one: twenty-seven-year-old minister Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This became the moment that transformed Dr. King into a national leader. Fred D. Gray, then twenty-four years old and one of only two Black lawyers in Montgomery, had prepared with Rosa Parks for the bus moment and now became Dr. King's first defense lawyer. The stakes were huge. This was not just a trial about a state statute; this was an attempt to launch a movement in the face of an often violent effort by a Southern city fighting to preserve segregation. And it would set Gray on a path that would lead him to making an impassioned argument to the Supreme Court against segregation in Montgomery's public transit. On the eve of the trial, Dr. King commented, "When the history books are written in the future generations, the historians will pause and say, 'There lived a great people-a Black people-who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.'" Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

Dan Abrams, David Fisher (Author), Fred D. Gray, Korey Jackson (Narrator)

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Shelter: A Black Tale of Homeland, Baltimore

When Lawrence Jackson accepted a new job teaching in Baltimore, he searched for schools for his sons and bought a house. This would be unremarkable but for the fact that he grew up in West Baltimore and his job was at Johns Hopkins, whose vexed relationship to its neighborhood, to the city and its history, provides a point of departure for this captivating memoir in essays. With sardonic wit, Jackson describes his struggle to make a home in the city that had just been convulsed by the uprising that followed the murder of Freddie Gray. His new neighborhood, Homeland-largely White, built on racial covenants-is not where he is "supposed" to live. But his purchase, and what it might mean for his children, provides a foundation for this personal, spiritual, and civic history that captures the raging absurdity of American life. Shelter is an extraordinary biography of a city and a celebration of our capacity for domestic thriving. It establishes Lawrence Jackson as a maverick, essential writer.

Lawrence Jackson (Author), Korey Jackson (Narrator)

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The Silent Shore: The Lynching of Matthew Williams and the Politics of Racism in the Free State

On December 4, 1931, a mob of white men in Salisbury, Maryland, lynched and set ablaze a twentythree-year-old Black man named Matthew Williams. His gruesome murder was part of a wave of white terrorism in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929, which exposed Black laborers to white rage. For nearly a century, the lynching of Matthew Williams has lived in the shadows of the more wellknown incidents of racial terror in the deep South, haunting both the Eastern Shore and the state of Maryland as a whole. In The Silent Shore, Charles L. Chavis Jr. draws on his discovery of previously unreleased investigative documents to meticulously reconstruct the full story of one of the last lynchings in Maryland. Bringing the painful truth of anti-Black violence to light, Chavis breaks the silence that surrounded Williams's death. Though Maryland lacked the notoriety for racial violence of Alabama or Mississippi, he writes, it nonetheless was the site of at least 40 spectacle lynchings after the abolition of slavery in 1864. Families of lynching victims rarely obtained any form of actual justice, but Williams's death would have a curious afterlife: Maryland's politically ambitious governor Albert C. Ritchie, in an attempt to position himself as a viable challenger to FDR, became one of the first governors in the United States to investigate the lynching death of a Black person. Ritchie tasked Patsy Johnson, a member of the Pinkerton detective agency and a former prizefighter, with going undercover in Salisbury and infiltrating the mob that murdered Williams. Johnson eventually befriended a young local who admitted to participating in the lynching and who also named several local law enforcement officers as ringleaders. Despite this, a grand jury, after hearing 124 witness statements, declined to indict the perpetrators. But this denial of justice galvanized Governor Ritchie's Interracial Commission, which would become one of the pioneering forces in the early civil rights movement in Maryland. Complicating historical narratives associated with the history of lynching in the city of Salisbury, The Silent Shore explores the immediate and lingering effect of Williams's death on the politics of racism in the United States, the Black community in Salisbury, the broader Eastern Shore, the state of Maryland, and the legacy of "modern-day lynchings."

Charles L. Chavis Jr. (Author), Korey Jackson (Narrator)

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Citadel

An interplanetary battle is renewed in an epic novel of a warring solar system by the author of Ballistic. The war should have been over. But it’s not for a group of nationalists grabbing for control. It’s been two weeks since a missile with a nuclear warhead tore through the planetary defenses in the most blistering large-scale attack ever committed in the history of the Gaia system. Commander Dunstan Park of the Rhodian navy has been handpicked to command an experimental cruiser that could dictate the course of the escalating conflict. All he has to do is keep the ship from falling into the wrong hands. On Gretia, the powder keg is beyond control. A terrorist attack against civilians draws Idina Chaudhary into a costly battle. It also forces a cautious Aden Jansen back into the fray. Now dedicated to a just cause, he’s still keeping his past hidden. The risk of exposing his former alliance could twist not only his fate but also that of his sister, Solveig, heir to the family empire. With no time to waste, Dunstan hits the ground running. But as insurgents threaten the unstable peace, what’s ahead for both sides could change the destiny of the Gaia system forever.

Marko Kloos (Author), Korey Jackson (Narrator)

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Gullah Spirituals: The Sound of Freedom and Protest in the South Carolina Sea Islands

In Gullah Spirituals musicologist Eric Crawford traces Gullah Geechee songs from their beginnings in West Africa to their height as songs for social change and Black identity in the twentieth century American South. While much has been done to study, preserve, and interpret Gullah culture in the lowcountry and sea islands of South Carolina and Georgia, some traditions like the shouting and rowing songs have been all but forgotten. This work, which focuses primarily on South Carolina's St. Helena Island, illuminates the remarkable history, survival, and influence of spirituals since the earliest recordings in the 1860s. Grounded in an oral tradition with a dynamic and evolving character, spirituals proved equally adaptable for use during social and political unrest and in unlikely circumstances. Most notably, the island's songs were used at the turn of the century to help rally support for the United States' involvement in World War I and to calm racial tensions between black and white soldiers. In the 1960s, civil rights activists adopted spirituals as freedom songs, though many were unaware of their connection to the island. Gullah Spirituals uses fieldwork, personal recordings, and oral interviews to build upon earlier studies and includes an appendix with more than fifty transcriptions of St. Helena spirituals, many no longer performed and more than half derived from Crawford's own transcriptions. Through this work, Crawford hopes to restore the cultural memory lost to time while tracing the long arc and historical significance of the St. Helena spirituals.

Eric Sean Crawford (Author), Korey Jackson (Narrator)

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Audiobooks Narrated by Korey Jackson