Narrator

Dion Graham

Dion Graham
  • Set in 1968 after the slaying of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., this immersive audio dramatization, inspired by the author’s own experiences, features an award-winning cast of 15 actors, in a fast-paced, suspenseful coming-of-age story.

    With his father’s mysterious disappearance and his brother Ronnie enlisting in the Vietnam War, 13-year-old TJ Crowley is left alone with his racist, unstable mother, Kate. The newly enforced Fair Housing Act results in the unthinkable for the Crowleys when a Black family, headed by the eminent Dr. Washington, crosses the racial red line and moves in next door. Kate is quick to warn TJ that their new neighbors are strictly off-limits and makes a panicked call to beg Ray, her old flame, to travel to their home in Wichita Kansas to help deal with “the problem next door.”

    At his now integrated junior high, TJ resents that teachers tell him he must get to know his Black classmates, yet he understands that staying out of trouble can only help assure him an all-important spot on the basketball team. At school, a violent confrontation with Leon, the tough new kid in 7th grade, lands them in the principal’s office. And at home, Ray ropes him into building a fence that will send the Washingtons a message that they’re not welcome. 

    But the fence can’t quiet the sounds of unfamiliar music floating over the fence nor hide the strength and beauty of his new classmate, Ivy Washington, who fiercely stands up for what she believes in.

    Over time, TJ begins to question the lessons he’s learned at home and decides to accept Dr. Washington’s invitation to visit their family. Devastated when his poor grades and bad behavior keep him from the basketball team, TJ turns to the doctor, a former athlete, who coaches him for the track team, teaching him how to throw the shot put.

    When TJ’s secret visits to the Washingtons are discovered, and a series of escalating hate crimes point to Ray, TJ is forced to make a defining choice that will forever change his life.

    Performed by Dani Martineck, Dion Graham, Tavia Gilbert, Johnny Heller, Kevin R. Free, Shayna Small, Ari Fliakos, Michael Crouch, Kirby Heyborne, Graham Halstead, Peter Berkrot, Thérèse Plummer, Brittany Pressley, John Wright, and Sheila Brown Kinnard, playing the role inspired by her mother, Josephine Brown. 

    Grant Overstake, a storyteller and educator, draws from his background as a former Miami Herald sports writer and decathlon All-American to write authentic sports themed novels of raw emotion. Grant and his wife, Claire, sing in the multicultural ARISE Ensemble, who’s music is featured in this program.

    An award-winning producer and director with over 400 titles to her credit, May Wuthrich is a former actor with a background in traditional book publishing and book-to-screen script development.

    Presented by Grain Valley Publishing 

    “The gospel music of the ARISE Ensemble enhances the listening experience. The audio drama has moments of remarkable verisimilitude: from the play-by-play announcing of a basketball game to the whirring of a helicopter in Vietnam. Performed by a gifted cast, this slice of our history stays with the listener.” —AudioFile (Earphones Award winner) 

  • A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE

    The long-awaited sequel to No Gods, No Monsters from award-winning author Cadwell Turnbull, We Are the Crisis sees humans and monsters clash as civil rights collide with preternatural forces.

    Three years after the Monster Massacre, members of Rebecca’s old wolf pack have begun to go missing without a trace.

    The world has undergone many changes in the years since monsters came out of the shadows. An anti-monster group known as the Black Hand has started to organize across the United States. In response, pro-monster organizations have been growing in numbers and militancy. Targeted killings of suspected monsters and their allies, monsters spirited away in the dead of night, and the beginnings of pro-monster legislation are all signs of a cosmic shift on the horizon. Is there any hope for lasting peace? Or are these events just precursors to a devastating monster-human war?

    Meanwhile, beneath it all, two ancient orders escalate their mysterious conflict, revealing dangerous secrets about the gods and the very origins of magic in the universe …

  • Named a BEST BOOK OF 2021 by the New York Times, NPR, the New York Public Library, Audible, Tor.com, Book Riot, Library Journal, and Kirkus!

    Longlisted for the 2022 PEN Open Book Award

    “Riveting…[A] tender, ferocious book.”—New York Times

    “Beautifully fantastical.”—NPR

    “Masterful.”—Chicago Tribune

    One October morning, Laina gets the news that her brother has been shot and killed by Boston cops. But what looks like a case of police brutality soon reveals something much stranger. Monsters are real. And they want everyone to know it.

    As creatures from myth and legend come out of the shadows, seeking safety through visibility, their emergence sets off a chain of seemingly unrelated events. Members of a local werewolf pack are threatened into silence. A professor follows a missing friend’s trail of bread crumbs to a mysterious secret society. And a young boy with unique abilities seeks refuge in a pro-monster organization with secrets of its own. Meanwhile, more people start disappearing, suicides and hate crimes increase, and protests erupt globally, both for and against the monsters.

    At the center is a mystery no one thinks to ask: Why now? What has frightened the monsters out of the dark?

    The world will soon find out.

  • Winfred Rembert grew up in a family of Georgia field laborers and joined the Civil Rights Movement as a teenager.

    He was arrested after fleeing a demonstration, later survived a near-lynching at the hands of law enforcement, and spent the next seven years on chain gangs. During that time he met the undaunted Patsy, who would become his wife. Years later, at the age of fifty-one and with Patsy’s encouragement, he started drawing and painting scenes from his youth using leather-tooling skills he learned in prison.

    Chasing Me to My Grave presents Rembert’s breathtaking body of work alongside his story, as told to Tufts Philosopher Erin I. Kelly. Rembert calls forth vibrant scenes of Black life on Cuthbert, Georgia’s Hamilton Avenue, where he first glimpsed the possibility of a life outside the cotton field. As he pays tribute, exuberant and heartfelt, to Cuthbert’s Black community and the people, including Patsy, who helped him to find the courage to revisit a traumatic past, Rembert brings to life the promise and the danger of Civil Rights protest, the brutalities of incarceration, his search for his mother’s love, and the epic bond he found with Patsy.

    Vivid, confrontational, revelatory, and complex, Chasing Me to My Grave is a searing memoir in prose and paintings that celebrates Black life and summons listeners to confront painful and urgent realities at the heart of American history and society.

    Includes a bonus PDF of artwork.

  • The book that readers have been waiting for.

    In Frisco’s Kid, Tasha Francisco was a strong-willed, independent child, thrown into the temporary care of her Navy SEAL uncle, Alan “Frisco” Francisco.

    Years older, but still just a kid himself, Thomas King lived nearby. Tasha took one look and declared she would marry him someday. Thomas wasn’t quite so sure about that.

    Now Tasha is a strong-willed, independent young woman, and Thomas is an officer and a hospital corpsman with SEAL Team Ten.

    When Tasha’s Uncle Alan asks Thomas for a favor—to help keep his niece safe as she travels to a remote ski lodge with her wealthy boyfriend’s royal family—Thomas grimly accepts his role as Tasha’s bodyguard. But things go horribly, terribly wrong, and Thomas and Tasha find themselves alone together in the freezing wilderness, on the run from the dangerous men who want her dead.

    Thomas knows only one thing for sure: He will sacrifice everything and anything to keep Tasha safe.

  • When rhino poachers kill two of his fellow rangers in Kruger Park, South African Defense Force veteran Cobus Venter reaches his breaking point. Quitting his job, he embarks on a vigilante mission to take down the animal-trafficking syndicate from the inside. Meanwhile, in Florida, insurance investigator Randall Knight is called to a private roadside zoo, where a new tiger cub of suspect lineage brought a virus that wiped out all the zoo’s tigers. The disease is just one species jump away from erupting into a deadly global human pandemic. What starts as a simple insurance claim leads Knight to discover a shocking new evolution in the business of illicit animal trafficking. Both men’s journeys take them from the darkest corners of Southeast Asia to the VIP gambling rooms of Macau, where they must stay alive long enough to stop a vicious international triad from ending wildlife as we know it.

    Animals is set in the world of global animal trafficking and follows converging story lines into a dark maze of corruption and organized crime, and through the journeys of the main characters, the novel explores the factors driving the exploitation and ruin of the natural world.

    Though the story is fiction, the characters, locations, and plot points are almost entirely rooted in fact. They are the product of hundreds of conversations with everyone from Jane Goodall to the CIA, to Damien Mander (an ex-mercenary turned animal activist). To experience the issue firsthand, Will Staples took a month-long research trip spanning three continents and seven countries. The journey was a profoundly transformative, life-altering experience.

    The author’s goal with this novel is to expose this issue to as many people as possible. To that end, all his income from this book will be donated to nonprofit organizations dedicated to protecting wildlife.

  • “A free license given to all acts of inhumanity and lust…this execrable crew of butchers.”—Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift

    Lucas Baird never got much of a break when he was a child, but by his early twenties, his good looks and easy manner allow him to skate through life without having to put in much effort. On the cusp of manhood in years yet still a boy—what Anthony Trollope called a hobbledehoy—charming Luke has enjoyed his extended adolescence of drinking and small-time cons. But when a freak accident compels him to leave LA—and leave fast—he finds himself in New York, in the seemingly idyllic Long Island beach town of Shorelane, where through a drunken mistake, he becomes trapped in a life-or-death ordeal. Luke’s only potential saviors are a group of local children, who are themselves lost and destined for paths much the same as Luke’s—if not worse—and a young woman, equally lost. For Luke to finally cross into manhood, he will have to come to terms with his own poor judgment and mortality, and find the courage to stay sane in the face of irrational actors.

    Reminiscent of The Beach and Lord of the Flies, Little Crew of Butchers is a masterful tale of the innocent savagery of children, but also of the redemptive power of love and courage, and the wisdom that comes from truly growing up.

  • Nineteen-year-old refugee Alephonsion Deng, from war-ravaged Sudan, had great expectations when he arrived in America three weeks before two planes crashed into the World Trade Towers. Money, he’d been told, was given to you in pillows. Machines did all the work. Education was free.

    Suburban mom Judy Bernstein had her own assumptions. The teenaged “Lost Boys of Sudan”—who’d traveled barefoot and starving for a thousand miles—needed a little mothering and a change of scenery: a trip to the zoo, perhaps, or maybe the beach.

    Partnered through a mentoring program in San Diego, these two individuals from opposite sides of the world began an eye-opening journey that radically altered each other’s vision and life.

    Disturbed in Their Nests recounts the first year of this heartwarming partnership; the initial misunderstandings, the growing trust, and, ultimately, their lasting friendship. Their contrasting points of view provide of-the-moment insight into what refugees face when torn from their own cultures and thrust into entirely foreign ones.

    Alepho struggles to understand the fast-paced, supersized way of life in America. He lands a job, but later is viciously beaten. Will he ever escape violence and hatred?

    Judy faces her own struggles: Alepho and his fellow refugees need jobs, education, housing, and health care. Why does she feel so compelled and how much support should she provide?

    The migrant crises in the Middle East, Central America, Europe, and Africa have put refugees in the headlines. Countless human tragedies are reduced to mere numbers. Personal stories such as Alepho’s add a face to the news and lead to greater understanding of the strangers among us. Readers experience Alepho’s discomfort, fears, and triumphs in a way that a newscast can’t convey. This timely and inspiring personal account will make readers laugh, cry, and examine their own place in the world.

  • A convention-defying novel by bestselling writer Walter Mosley, John Woman recounts the transformation of an unassuming boy named Cornelius Jones into John Woman, an unconventional history professor―while the legacy of a hideous crime lurks in the shadows.

    At twelve years old, Cornelius, the son of an Italian-American woman and an older black man from Mississippi named Herman, secretly takes over his father’s job at a silent film theater in New York’s East Village. Five years later, as Herman lives out his last days, he shares his wisdom with his son, explaining that the person who controls the narrative of history controls their own fate.

    After his father dies and his mother disappears, Cornelius sets about reinventing himself―as Professor John Woman, a man who will spread Herman’s teachings into the classrooms of his unorthodox southwestern university and beyond. But there are other individuals who are attempting to influence the narrative of John Woman and who might know something about the facts of his hidden past.

    Engaging with some of the most provocative ideas of recent intellectual history, John Woman is a compulsively readable, deliciously unexpected novel about the way we tell stories and whether the stories we tell have the power to change the world.

  • The distinguished American civil rights leader, W. E. B. Du Bois first published these fiery essays, sketches, and poems individually in 1920 in the Atlantic, the Journal of Race Development, and other periodicals. Reflecting the author's ideas as a politician, historian, and artist, this volume has long moved and inspired readers with its militant cry for social, political, and economic reform. It is essential reading for all students of African American history.

  • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The epic novel based on the life of Valentino Achak Deng who, along with thousands of other children —the so-called Lost Boys—was forced to leave his village in Sudan at the age of seven and trek hundreds of miles by foot, pursued by militias, government bombers, and wild animals, crossing the deserts of three countries to find freedom.

    When he finally is resettled in the United States, he finds a life full of promise, but also heartache and myriad new challenges. Moving, suspenseful, and unexpectedly funny, What Is the What is an astonishing novel that illuminates the lives of millions through one extraordinary man.

    “A testament to the triumph of hope over experience, human resilience over tragedy and disaster.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

    "An absolute classic. . . . Compelling, important, and vital to the understanding of the politics and emotional consequences of oppression.” —People


  • “[Tyson] tackles a great range of subjects…with great humor, humility, and—most important—humanity.” —Entertainment Weekly

    Neil deGrasse Tyson has a talent for guiding readers through the mysteries of outer space with stunning clarity and almost childlike enthusiasm. Here, Tyson compiles his favorite essays that he wrote for Natural History magazine across a myriad of cosmic topics, from astral life at the frontiers of astrobiology to the movie industry’s feeble efforts to get its night skies right.

    Tyson introduces us to the physics of black holes by explaining the gory details of what would happen to our bodies if we fell into one, examining the needless friction between science and religion in the context of historical conflicts, and noting Earth’s progression to “an insignificantly small speck in the cosmos.”

    Renowned for his ability to blend content, accessibility, and humor, Tyson is a natural teacher who simplifies some of the most complex concepts in astrophysics while sharing his infectious excitement for our universe.

  • Swirling riffs of language and a propulsive beat set this gritty, transcendent novel in motion.

    Amid the sparkle and hum of a New York City winter, Jed and his best friend, Flyer, are filming a documentary of their neighborhood. All around them are images that Jed’s older brother Zeke wrote about: drummers, drunks, dog walkers, and the beautiful water towers that dot the city’s skyline. But what Jed is really in search of is Zeke, a poet who loved jazzman Charlie “Bird” Parker and who left behind his CDs, a notebook, and a lot of unanswered questions.

    When Jed encounters a mysterious homeless girl he thinks holds the key to connecting him to Zeke, it could be his only way to unlock his deepest sorrow and discover how to be—who to be—on his own.