-
The Unboxing of a Black Girl
- Narrated by: Angela Shanté
- Length: 1 hr and 17 mins
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Buy for $9.09
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Publisher's summary
A LOVE LETTER TO BLACK GIRLS
Set in New York City in the ’90s, Angela Shanté’s poems and stories paint a mosaic of childhood that is shaped by the past and reverberates into the present. As Shanté navigates the city through memory, this timeless book illuminates the places where Black girls are nurtured or boxed in, through stories and poems about expectations, exploitation, love, loss, and self-realization.
Her poems center on pivotal moments of Black childhood, using footnotes that encourage you to listen to songs, watch movies, and even learn how to play Spades to further contextualize and celebrate Black culture in every aspect of life.
But even with Black joy, life ain’t no crystal stair. Between fond memories, Shanté also explores the dark corners of childhood by showing us the ways adultification, misogynoir, and sexual assault can impact girlhood. Every piece in this memoir invites you to unpack the past—to find and transcend the expectations and boxes the world puts Black girls in.
People who viewed this also viewed...
-
The Great Cool Ranch Dorito in the Sky
- By: Josh Galarza
- Narrated by: Robb Moreira
- Length: 9 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Ever since cancer invaded his adoptive mother’s life, Brett feels like he’s losing everything, most of all control. To cope, Brett fuels all of his anxieties into epic fantasies, including his intergalactic Kid Condor comic book series, which features food constellations and characters not unlike those in his own life. But lately Brett’s grip on reality has started to lose its hold. The fictions he’s been telling himself—about his unattractive body, the feeling that he’s a burden to his best friend, that he’s too messed up to be loved—have consumed him completely.
-
-
Original, Heartfelt, Healing - Awesomely Creative and Often Hilarious
- By ALS on 08-02-24
By: Josh Galarza
-
Buffalo Dreamer
- By: Violet Duncan
- Narrated by: Ashley Callingbull
- Length: 2 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Summer and her family always spend relaxed summers in Alberta, Canada, on the reservation where her mom’s family lives. But this year is turning out to be an eye-opening one. First, Summer has begun to have vivid dreams in which she's running away from one of the many real-life residential schools that tore Native children from their families and tried to erase their Native identities. Not long after that, she learns that unmarked children’s graves have been discovered at the school her grandpa attended as a child.
-
-
Beautiful Story
- By Jennifer on 09-13-24
By: Violet Duncan
-
Kareem Between
- By: Shifa Saltagi Safadi
- Narrated by: Peter Romano
- Length: 3 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Seventh grade begins, and Kareem’s already fumbled it. His best friend moved away, he messed up his tryout for the football team, and because of his heritage, he was voluntold to show the new kid—a Syrian refugee with a thick and embarrassing accent—around school. Just when Kareem thinks his middle school life has imploded, the hotshot QB promises to get Kareem another tryout for the squad. There’s a catch: to secure that chance, Kareem must do something he knows is wrong.
-
The First State of Being
- By: Erin Entrada Kelly
- Narrated by: Ramon de Ocampo
- Length: 5 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It's August 1999. For twelve-year-old Michael Rosario, life at Fox Run Apartments in Red Knot, Delaware, is as ordinary as ever—except for the looming Y2K crisis and his overwhelming crush on his fifteen-year-old babysitter, Gibby. But when a disoriented teenage boy named Ridge appears out of nowhere, Michael discovers there is more to life than stockpiling supplies and pining over Gibby.
-
-
Great, diverse, very different plot!
- By pamela miller on 04-16-24
-
Ariel Crashes a Train
- By: Olivia A. Cole
- Narrated by: Olivia A. Cole
- Length: 7 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Ariel is afraid of her own mind. She already feels like she is too big, too queer, too rough to live up to her parents' exacting expectations, or to fit into what the world expects of a “good girl.” And as violent fantasies she can’t control take over every aspect of her life, she is convinced something much deeper is wrong with her. Ever since her older sister escaped to college, Ariel isn't sure if her careful rituals and practiced distance will be enough to keep those around her safe anymore.
By: Olivia A. Cole
-
Everything We Never Had
- By: Randy Ribay
- Narrated by: JB Tadena, Ramón de Ocampo, Manny Jacinto, and others
- Length: 6 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From the author of the National Book Award finalist Patron Saints of Nothing comes an emotionally charged, moving novel about four generations of Filipino American boys grappling with identity, masculinity, and their fraught father-son relationships.
-
-
Stirring literary YA for the post-pandemic world
- By Amazon Customer on 09-05-24
By: Randy Ribay
-
The Great Cool Ranch Dorito in the Sky
- By: Josh Galarza
- Narrated by: Robb Moreira
- Length: 9 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Ever since cancer invaded his adoptive mother’s life, Brett feels like he’s losing everything, most of all control. To cope, Brett fuels all of his anxieties into epic fantasies, including his intergalactic Kid Condor comic book series, which features food constellations and characters not unlike those in his own life. But lately Brett’s grip on reality has started to lose its hold. The fictions he’s been telling himself—about his unattractive body, the feeling that he’s a burden to his best friend, that he’s too messed up to be loved—have consumed him completely.
-
-
Original, Heartfelt, Healing - Awesomely Creative and Often Hilarious
- By ALS on 08-02-24
By: Josh Galarza
-
Buffalo Dreamer
- By: Violet Duncan
- Narrated by: Ashley Callingbull
- Length: 2 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Summer and her family always spend relaxed summers in Alberta, Canada, on the reservation where her mom’s family lives. But this year is turning out to be an eye-opening one. First, Summer has begun to have vivid dreams in which she's running away from one of the many real-life residential schools that tore Native children from their families and tried to erase their Native identities. Not long after that, she learns that unmarked children’s graves have been discovered at the school her grandpa attended as a child.
-
-
Beautiful Story
- By Jennifer on 09-13-24
By: Violet Duncan
-
Kareem Between
- By: Shifa Saltagi Safadi
- Narrated by: Peter Romano
- Length: 3 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Seventh grade begins, and Kareem’s already fumbled it. His best friend moved away, he messed up his tryout for the football team, and because of his heritage, he was voluntold to show the new kid—a Syrian refugee with a thick and embarrassing accent—around school. Just when Kareem thinks his middle school life has imploded, the hotshot QB promises to get Kareem another tryout for the squad. There’s a catch: to secure that chance, Kareem must do something he knows is wrong.
-
The First State of Being
- By: Erin Entrada Kelly
- Narrated by: Ramon de Ocampo
- Length: 5 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It's August 1999. For twelve-year-old Michael Rosario, life at Fox Run Apartments in Red Knot, Delaware, is as ordinary as ever—except for the looming Y2K crisis and his overwhelming crush on his fifteen-year-old babysitter, Gibby. But when a disoriented teenage boy named Ridge appears out of nowhere, Michael discovers there is more to life than stockpiling supplies and pining over Gibby.
-
-
Great, diverse, very different plot!
- By pamela miller on 04-16-24
-
Ariel Crashes a Train
- By: Olivia A. Cole
- Narrated by: Olivia A. Cole
- Length: 7 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Ariel is afraid of her own mind. She already feels like she is too big, too queer, too rough to live up to her parents' exacting expectations, or to fit into what the world expects of a “good girl.” And as violent fantasies she can’t control take over every aspect of her life, she is convinced something much deeper is wrong with her. Ever since her older sister escaped to college, Ariel isn't sure if her careful rituals and practiced distance will be enough to keep those around her safe anymore.
By: Olivia A. Cole
-
Everything We Never Had
- By: Randy Ribay
- Narrated by: JB Tadena, Ramón de Ocampo, Manny Jacinto, and others
- Length: 6 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From the author of the National Book Award finalist Patron Saints of Nothing comes an emotionally charged, moving novel about four generations of Filipino American boys grappling with identity, masculinity, and their fraught father-son relationships.
-
-
Stirring literary YA for the post-pandemic world
- By Amazon Customer on 09-05-24
By: Randy Ribay
-
Wild Dreamers
- By: Margarita Engle
- Narrated by: Zac Aleman, Andre Bellido, Alejandra Reynoso
- Length: 2 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Ana and her mother have been living out of their car ever since her militant father became one of the FBI’s most wanted. Leandro has struggled with debilitating anxiety since his family fled Cuba on a perilous raft. One moonlit night, in a wilderness park in California, Ana and Leandro meet. Their connection is instant—a shared radiance that feels both scientific and magical. Then they discover they are not alone: a huge mountain lion stalks through the trees, one of many wild animals whose habitat has been threatened by humans.
-
-
Complexity of Growing up as a Dreamer
- By Jeanie Lemon on 07-02-24
By: Margarita Engle
-
Ghostroots
- Stories
- By: Pemi Aguda
- Narrated by: Délé Ogundiran, Ore Apampa-Araba
- Length: 5 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A debut collection of stories set in a hauntingly reimagined Lagos where characters vie for freedom from ancestral ties.
By: Pemi Aguda
-
The Villain's Dance
- By: Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Roland Glasser - translator
- Narrated by: Amir Abdullah
- Length: 6 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Zaire. Late 90's. Mobutu's thirty-year reign is tottering. In Lubumbashi, the stubbornly homeless Sanza has fallen in with a trio of veteran street kids led by the devious Ngungi. A chance encounter with the mysterious Monsieur Guillaume seems to offer a way out . . . Meanwhile in Angola, Molakisi has joined thousands of fellow Zairians hoping to make their fortunes hunting diamonds, while Austrian Franz finds himself roped into writing the memoirs of the charismatic Tshiamuena, the "Madonna of the Cafunfo Mines."
By: Fiston Mwanza Mujila, and others
-
Free Period
- By: Ali Terese
- Narrated by: Josephine Huang, Cassandra Cassandra
- Length: 7 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Helen and Gracie are pranking their way through middle school when a stinky stunt lands them in the front office—again. Because nothing else has curbed their chaos, the principal orders the best friends to do the unthinkable: care about something. So they join the school's Community Action Club with plans to do as little as humanly possible. But when Helen is caught unprepared by an early period and bleeds through her pants— they were gold lamé!—the girls take over the club's campaign for maxi pads in bathrooms for all students who menstruate.
By: Ali Terese
-
Mid-Air
- By: Alicia D. Williams
- Narrated by: Landon Woodson
- Length: 4 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It’s the last few months of eighth grade, and Isaiah feels lost. He thought his summer was going to be him and his boys Drew and Darius, hanging out, doing wheelies, watching martial arts movies, and breaking tons of Guinness World Records before high school. But now, more and more, Drew seems to be fading from their friendship, and though he won’t admit it, Isaiah knows exactly why. Because Darius is…gone.
-
Modern Poetry
- Poems
- By: Diane Seuss
- Narrated by: Diane Seuss
- Length: 2 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Diane Seuss's signature voice—audacious in its honesty, virtuosic in its artistry, outsider in its attitude—has become one of the most original in contemporary poetry. Her latest collection takes its title, Modern Poetry, from the first textbook Seuss encountered as a child and the first poetry course she took in college, as an enrapt but ill-equipped student, one who felt poetry was beyond her reach. Many of the poems make use of the forms and terms of musical and poetic craft and contend with the works of writers overrepresented in textbooks and anthologies and those often underrepresented.
By: Diane Seuss
-
Soldiers and Kings
- Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling
- By: Jason De León
- Narrated by: Jason De León
- Length: 9 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Political instability, poverty, climate change, and the insatiable appetite for cheap labor all fuel clandestine movement across borders. As those borders harden, the demand for smugglers who aid migrants across them increases every year.
-
-
Gritty and raw
- By Amazon Customer on 06-02-24
By: Jason De León
-
Whiskey Tender
- A Memoir
- By: Deborah Taffa
- Narrated by: Charley Flyte
- Length: 11 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Whiskey Tender traces how a mixed tribe native girl—born on the California Yuma reservation and raised in Navajo territory in New Mexico—comes to her own interpretation of identity, despite her parent’s desires for her to transcend the class and “Indian” status of her birth through education, and despite the Quechan tribe’s particular traditions and beliefs regarding oral and recorded histories.
-
-
I liked the evolution of the main character and her relationship to her father.
- By Amazon Customer on 07-06-24
By: Deborah Taffa
-
Aednan
- An Epic
- By: Linnea Axelsson, Saskia Vogel - translator
- Narrated by: Angela Dawe
- Length: 2 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Northern Sámi, the word Ædnan means the land, the earth, and my mother. These are all crucial forces within the lives of the Indigenous families that animate this groundbreaking book: an astonishing verse novel that chronicles a hundred years of change: a book that will one day stand alongside Halldór Laxness’s Independent People and Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter as an essential Scandinavian epic.
By: Linnea Axelsson, and others
-
mother
- Penguin Poets
- By: m.s. RedCherries
- Narrated by: m.s. RedCherries
- Length: 2 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
mother is a work rooted in an intimate fracture: an Indigenous child is adopted out of her tribe and raised by a non-Indian family. As an adult finding her way back to her origins, our unnamed narrator begins to put the pieces of her birth family's history together through the stories told to her by her mother, father, sister, and brother, all of whom remained on the reservation where she was born. Through oral histories, family lore, and imagined pasts and futures, a collage of their community emerges, raising profound questions about adoption, inheritance, and Indigenous identity in America.
-
-
fantastic!
- By Amazon Customer on 07-29-24
By: m.s. RedCherries
-
Unshrinking
- How to Face Fatphobia
- By: Kate Manne
- Narrated by: Kate Manne
- Length: 6 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Blending intimate stories with the trenchant analysis that has become her signature, Manne shows why fatphobia has become a vital social justice issue. Over the last several decades, implicit bias has waned in every category, from race to sexual orientation, except one: body size. Manne examines how anti-fatness operates—how it leads us to make devastating assumptions about a person’s attractiveness, fortitude, and intellect, and how it intersects with other systems of oppression.
-
-
outstanding takedown of diet culture
- By AnglophileLV on 09-06-24
By: Kate Manne
-
My Friends
- A Novel
- By: Hisham Matar
- Narrated by: Hisham Matar
- Length: 13 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
One evening, as a young boy growing up in Benghazi, Khaled hears a bizarre short story read aloud on the radio, about a man being eaten alive by a cat, and has the sense that his life has been changed forever. Obsessed by the power of those words—and by their enigmatic author, Hosam Zowa—Khaled eventually embarks on a journey that will take him far from home, to pursue a life of the mind at the University of Edinburgh. There, thrust into an open society that is miles away from the world he knew in Libya, Khaled begins to change.
-
-
A beautiful book
- By Vly Summit on 05-19-24
By: Hisham Matar