Black History Month at Audible–No Boundaries

This year’s Black History Month celebrations at Audible echoed our efforts to amplify a range of the Black experience – embracing historical figures, emerging storytellers, creators, tastemakers and some of our own phenomenal colleagues through engaging and meaningful conversations.

We kicked off the month with a roundtable discussion for our employees and interns on career paths, hosted by the Black Employee Network (BEN). Panelists talked about what they learned on their way to achieving success—emphasizing the importance of leaning into your authentic self, leading with capability and confidence, and staying on course to achieve career goals.

Our interns also participated in a Q&A session with Audible Editorial Director and BEN co-chair Abby West and Newark legend Mikki Taylor about Taylor’s life as a leading authority on inner and outer beauty for women of color and Taylor’s new Audible Original, Force of Beauty: A Newark Family Memoir.

Our Audible Live Black History Month series for our listeners included:

• Best-selling author Tayari Jones in conversation with Abby West about her Audible Originals Dispossession and Half Light.
• Acclaimed roboticist Dr. Ayanna Howard discussing the implications of racial and sexual biases on Artificial Intelligence with actress Amandla Stenberg, the narrator of Howard’s Audible Original Sex, Race & Robots.
• The Vanishing Half author Brit Bennett and Passing narrator (and star of the feature film) Tessa Thompson unpacking the concept of passing as white, and the nuances of colorism and racism.

Abby West also spoke with Dr. Henry Louis Gates in an Amazon Live session about his historical look at The Black Church, and with author and Black cultural critic Rebecca Carroll about Surviving the White Gaze. To wrap up the month, Audible employees celebrated Black poetry in a Voices of Audible collection and enjoyed a virtual event with Jasmine Mans, a poet, author and artist from Newark, New Jersey, who shared poems from her highly-anticipated book Black Girl, Call Home.

For more Black History Month titles from our editors, visit the No Boundaries collection on our US site.