S.E Sconyers

For Tabitha Walker, her grandmother’s old adage, “Black girls must die exhausted” is becoming all too true. Discovering she’s pregnant—after she was told she may not be able to have biological children—Tabitha throws herself headfirst into the world of “single mothers by choice.” Between her job, doctor’s appointments, and preparing for the baby, she’s worn out. And that’s before her boss at the local news station starts getting complaints from viewers about Tabitha’s natural hair.

Pop culture is the Pandora’s box of our lives. Racism, wealth, poverty, beauty, inclusion, exclusion, and hope - all of these intractable and unavoidable features course through the media we consume. Examining pop culture’s impact on her life, Nichole Perkins takes listeners on a rollicking trip through the last 20 years of music, media, and the internet from the perspective of one Southern Black woman.

"The word 'love' is most often defined as a noun, yet we would all love better if we used it as a verb,” writes Bell hooks as she comes out fighting and on fire in All About Love. Here, at her most provocative and intensely personal, renowned scholar, cultural critic, and feminist Bell Hooks offers a proactive new ethic for a society bereft with lovelessness - not the lack of romance, but the lack of care, compassion, and unity.

"I’m James Taylor and I’m a professional autobiographer", says the celebrated folk singer at the start of this tender audio memoir. Through decades of music by one of the best-selling musicians of all time, who created classics like "Fire and Rain" and "Carolina in My Mind", James Taylor has doled out his history in the poetry of his work. Taylor says his early life is, "the source of many of my songs", and Break Shot is a tour of his first 21 years in rich, new detail.

In her current reign at Power 105.1 and for nearly two decades at New York's Hot 97, Angie Martinez has had one of the highest rated radio shows in the country. After working her way up as an intern, she burst on the scene as a young female jock whose on-air "Battle of the Beats" segment broke records and became a platform for emerging artists like a young Jay Z. Angie quickly became known for intimate, high-profile interviews, mediating feuds between artists, and taking on the most controversial issues in hip-hop.

For decades, Demi Moore has been synonymous with celebrity. From iconic film roles to high-profile relationships, Moore has never been far from the spotlight - or the headlines. Even as Demi was becoming the highest paid actress in Hollywood, however, she was always outrunning her past. Throughout her rise to fame and during some of the most pivotal moments of her life, Demi battled addiction, body image issues, and childhood trauma that would follow her for years - all while juggling a skyrocketing career and at times negative public perception.

In Gay Girl, Good God, author Jackie Hill Perry shares her own story, offering practical tools that helped her in the process of finding wholeness. Jackie grew up fatherless and experienced gender confusion. She embraced masculinity and homosexuality with every fiber of her being. She knew that Christians had a lot to say about all of the above. But was she supposed to change herself? How was she supposed to stop loving women, when homosexuality felt more natural to her than heterosexuality ever could?

In this moving collection of thought-provoking essays infused with her unique wisdom and deep humor, Union tells astonishingly personal and true stories about power, color, gender, feminism, and fame. Union tackles a range of experiences, including bullying, beauty standards and competition between women in Hollywood, growing up in white California suburbia and then spending summers with her Black relatives in Nebraska, coping with crushes, puberty, and the divorce of her parents.

An Audible Original from Audible Theater, Proof of Love is an Emerging Playwrights Commission, written for and available exclusively on Audible. Constance thought she had a happy life and a loving husband. Suddenly, a tragic accident splinters her upper-class black family - and forces Constance to face uncomfortable truths about her marriage and herself. Proof of Love is the explosive, funny, and moving new one-woman play by Chisa Hutchinson, member of the first class of talent supported by the Audible Playwrights Fund.