Audiobooks narrated by Mia Ellis

Lileala has just been named the Rare Indigo-beauty among beauties-and is about to embrace her stardom, until something threatens to change her whole lifestyle and turn the planet of Swazembi upside down. Colonized by the descendants of Earth's West African Dogon Tribe, the planet of Swazembi is a blazing, color-rich utopia and famous vacation center of the galaxy. No one is used to serious trouble in this idyllic, peace-loving world, least of all the Rare Indigo. But Lileala's perfect, pampered lifestyle is about to be shattered. The unthinkable happens and her glorious midnight skin becomes infected with a mysterious disease. Where her skin should glisten like diamonds mixed with coal, instead it scabs and scars. On top of that, she starts to hear voices in her head, and everything around her becomes confusing and frightening. Lileala's destiny, however, goes far beyond her beauty. While searching for a cure, she stumbles upon something much more valuable. A new power awakens inside her, and she realizes her whole life, and the galaxy with it, is about to change . . .

Denise Crittendon (Author), Mia Ellis (Narrator)

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When a Heart Stops

As a medical examiner, Serena Hopkins is used to dealing with death. But that doesn't make it any easier when she's called to the eerie scene of a murder-especially when Serena realizes that she knows the victim. Nearly as unnerving is the presence of FBI agent Dominic Allen, her childhood crush. As evidence mounts and points to a serial killer with disturbingly familiar methods, Serena and Dominic must work to find a pattern and stop the killings before the murderer strikes again. And when Serena's own life is at stake, she must decide if the secret she has been keeping has put her next on the killer's hit list. Can she trust Dominic with the truth before it's too late?

Lynette Eason (Author), Mia Ellis (Narrator)

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What Remains True

From the outside, the Davenports look like any other family living a completely ordinary life-until that devastating day when five-year-old Jonah is killed, and the family is torn apart. As the fury of guilt engulfs them, the Davenports slowly start to unravel, one by one. Losing her son forces Rachel to withdraw into a frayed, fuzzy reality. Her husband, Sam, tries to remain stoic, but he's consumed by regret with the choices he's made. Eden mourns her brother, while desperately fighting to regain a sense of normalcy. And Aunt Ruth, Rachel's sister, works too hard to care for the family, even as her own personal issues haunt her. Told from multiple points of view-including Jonah's-the family struggles to cope with unthinkable loss. But as they face their own dark secrets about that terrible day, they have a choice: to be swallowed up in sadness forever, or begin the raw, arduous ascent back to living.

Janis Thomas (Author), Amy McFadden, Lauren Ezzo, Mia Ellis, Mikael Naramore, Nick Podehl, Scott Lange, Scott Merriman, Tanya Eby (Narrator)

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We Shall Sing a Song into the Deep

A Canticle for Leibowitz meets The Hunt for Red October in We Shall Sing a Song into the Deep, a lyrical and page-turning coming-of-age exploration of duty, belief, and the post-apocalypse from breakout newcomer Andrew Kelly Stewart. Remy is a Chorister, rescued from the surface world and raised to sing in a choir of young boys. Remy is part of a strange crew who control the Leviathan, an aging nuclear submarine, that bears a sacred mission: to trigger the Second Coming when the time is right. But Remy has a secret too-she's the submarine's only girl. Gifted with the missile's launch key by the Leviathan's dying caplain, she swears to keep it safe. Safety, however, is not the priority of the new caplain, who has his own ideas about the mission. When a surface-dweller is captured during a raid, Remy's faith becomes completely overturned. Now, her last judgement may transform the fate of everything.

Andrew Kelly Stewart (Author), Mia Ellis (Narrator)

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The End of Adolescence: The Lost Art of Delaying Adulthood

Experts and the general public are convinced that young people today are trapped in an extended adolescence-coddled, unaccountable, and more reluctant to take on adult responsibilities than previous generations. Nancy Hill and Alexis Redding argue that what is perceived as stalled development is in fact typical. Those reprimanding today's youth have forgotten that they once balked at the transition to adulthood themselves. From an abandoned archive of recordings of college students from half a century ago, Hill and Redding discovered that there is nothing new about feeling insecure, questioning identities, and struggling to find purpose. Like many of today's young adults, those of two generations ago also felt isolated and anxious that the path to success felt fearfully narrow. Yet, among today's young adults, these developmentally appropriate struggles are seen as evidence of immaturity. If society adopts this jaundiced perspective, it will fail in its mission to prepare young adults for citizenship, family life, and work. Instead, Hill and Redding offer an alternative view of delaying adulthood and identify the benefits of taking additional time to construct a meaningful future. When adults set aside judgment, there is a lot they can do to ensure that young adults get the same developmental chances they had.

Alexis Redding, Nancy E. Hill (Author), Mia Ellis (Narrator)

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Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage

Most times left solely within the confine of plantation narratives, slavery was far from a land-based phenomenon. This book reveals for the first time how it took critical shape at sea. Expanding the gaze even more widely, the book centers on how the oceanic transport of human cargoes-known as the infamous Middle Passage-comprised a violently regulated process foundational to the institution of bondage. Sowande' Mustakeem's groundbreaking study goes inside the Atlantic slave trade to explore the social conditions and human costs embedded in the world of maritime slavery. Mining ship logs, records, and personal documents, Mustakeem teases out the social histories produced between those on traveling ships: slaves, captains, sailors, and surgeons. As she shows, crewmen manufactured captives through enforced dependency, relentless cycles of physical, psychological terror, and pain that led to the making-and unmaking-of enslaved Africans held and transported onboard slave ships. Mustakeem relates how this process, and related power struggles, played out not just for adult men, but also for women, children, teens, infants, nursing mothers, the elderly, diseased, ailing, and dying.

Sowande' M Mustakeem, Sowande’ M Mustakeem (Author), Mia Ellis (Narrator)

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Sister Surrogate

Three sisters and a baby equal family drama . . . Bridgette, Ivy, and Savannah have always been close, and as with any sisterhood, it hasn't been without its challenges, but they always manage to come together in times of need. When the youngest, Savannah, is faced with a life-altering illness which threatens her lifelong desire to have children, one of her sisters offers to give her the ultimate gift-to become her surrogate. While Savannah is overwhelmed with happiness and gratitude about motherhood, not everyone in the family shares her sentiments. The upcoming addition to their family seems to cause discord rather than joy.

Lachelle Weaver (Author), Mia Ellis (Narrator)

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Sister Style: The Politics of Appearance for Black Women Political Elites

In Sister Style, Nadia E. Brown and Danielle Casarez Lemi argue that Black women's political experience and the way that voters evaluate them is shaped overtly by their skin tone and hair texture, with hair being a particular point of scrutiny. They ask what the politics of appearance for Black women mean for Black women politicians and Black voters, and how expectations about self-presentation differ for Black women versus Black men, White men, and White women. Black women running for office face pressure, often from campaign consultants and even close colleagues, to change their style in order to look more like White women. However, as this book shows, Black women candidates and elected officials react differently to these pressures depending on factors like age and incumbency. Moreover, Brown and Lemi delve into the ways in which Black voters react to Black female candidates based on appearance. They base their argument, in part, on focus groups with Black women candidates and elected officials, and show that there are generational differences that determine what sorts of styles Black women choose to adopt and to what extent they change their physical appearance based on external expectations.

Danielle Casarez Lemi, Nadia E. Brown (Author), Mia Ellis (Narrator)

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Returning the Self to Nature: Undoing Our Collective Narcissism and Healing Our Planet

Using the lens of ecopsychology, Returning the Self to Nature shows that the pervasive and extreme forms of narcissism we find in many modern societies are fundamentally the result of alienation from the natural world. But it doesn't have to be that way. Returning the Self to Nature is written for the person who no longer wishes to function in a world that revolves around selfish, disconnected identity models and yearns to step into healthy relationships with one's self, one's community, and our planet. Seeing the suffering of the planet and that of humans as inseparably linked-the ecological crisis as psychological crisis, and vice versa-opens the door to a mutuality of healing between people and nature. At the heart of both chronic and acute forms of narcissism is a socially constructed false self. Through unflinching analysis and meditation practices that encourage visualizing and embodying the wild naturalness of being human, the listener will gain skills to begin experiencing a courageous, pluralistic, and ecological self. This book is an invitation to wake up from the dream of the false self and join the movement toward social and planetary healing.

Jeanine M. Canty (Author), Mia Ellis (Narrator)

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Remember Mia

Estelle Paradise wakes up in a hospital after being found near dead at the bottom of a ravine with a fragmented memory and a vague sense of loss. Then a terrifying reality sets in: her seven-month-old daughter, Mia, is missing. Frustrated and unable to explain her daughter's disappearance, Estelle begins a desperate search. But when the lack of evidence casts doubt on her story, Estelle becomes the number one suspect in the eyes of the police and the media. As hope of reuniting with Mia becomes all she has left, Estelle will do anything to find answers: What has she done to her baby? And what has someone else done to her?

Alexandra Burt (Author), Mia Ellis (Narrator)

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Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code

From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity. Benjamin argues that automation, far from being a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to the racism of a previous era. Presenting the concept of the 'New Jim Code,' she shows how a range of discriminatory designs encode inequity by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies; by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions; or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. Moreover, she makes a compelling case for race itself as a kind of technology, designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice in the architecture of everyday life. This illuminating guide provides conceptual tools for decoding tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. In doing so, it challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold but also the ones we ourselves manufacture.

Ruha Benjamin (Author), Mia Ellis (Narrator)

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Plantation Politics and Campus Rebellions: Power, Diversity, and the Emancipatory Struggle in Higher

Plantation Politics and Campus Rebellions provides a multidisciplinary exploration of the contemporary university's entanglement with the history of slavery and settler colonialism in the United States. Inspired by more than a hundred student-led protests during the Movement for Black Lives, contributors examine how campus rebellions-and university responses to them-expose the racialized inequities at the core of higher education. Plantation politics are embedded in the everyday workings of universities-in not only the physical structures and spaces of academic institutions, but in its recruitment and attainment strategies, hiring practices, curriculum, and notions of sociality, safety, and community. The book is comprised of three sections that highlight how white supremacy shapes campus communities and classrooms; how current diversity and inclusion initiatives perpetuate inequality; and how students, staff, and faculty practice resistance in the face of institutional and legislative repression. The volume is indispensable for students, faculty, student affairs professionals, and administrators invested in learning more about how power operates within education and imagining emancipatory futures.

Bianca C. Williams, Dian D. Squire, Frank A. Tuitt (Author), Mia Ellis (Narrator)

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Audiobooks Narrated by Mia Ellis