Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 Audiobook

About the Authors

Isabel Wilkerson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and recipient of the National Humanities Medal, is the author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestsellers The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste. Her debut work won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and was named to Time’s 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the 2010s and the New York Times’s list of the Best Nonfiction of All Time. She has taught at Princeton, Emory, and Boston Universities and has lectured at more than two hundred other colleges and universities across the United States and in Europe and Asia.

Ishmael Reed has taught at Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth and has long been on the faculty at UC Berkeley. He is the award-winning author of more than twenty books—novels, essays, plays, and poetry—that have been translated into seven languages. Reed has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and was twice nominated for the National Book Award. He lives in Oakland, California.

Colleen Delany has been a sparkling jewel in the crown of Washington’s vastly talented acting community for thirty-seven days now and will confidently challenge to a fierce best out of three in “paper-rock-scissors” anyone wishing to topple her from that lofty perch. Primarily a stage actress,—having played roles at Shakespeare Theatre Company, Goodman Theatre, Arena Stage, Signature Theatre, Folger Shakespeare Library, Studio Theatre, Olney Theatre, Woolly Mammoth, Theater J, Washington Stage Guild, Theater of the First Amendment, and Source Theatre, among others—Ms. Delany does a you-name-it of various acting jobs, including audiobook narration.

Kiese Laymon is the author of Heavy: An American Memoir, the novel Long Division, and the essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. He was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, and is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing and English at the University of Mississippi.

Donna Brazile is the former chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University, and a contributor to ABC News. A graduate of Louisiana State University, she worked on every presidential campaign from 1976 through 2000, when she served as Al Gore’s campaign manager. In 2014, she was appointed by President Barack Obama to serve on to the board of the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. She is founder and managing director of Brazile & Associates LLC, a general consulting, grassroots advocacy, and training firm based in Washington, DC.

Angela Davis is a political activist, scholar, author, and speaker. She is an outspoken advocate for the oppressed and exploited, writing on Black liberation, prison abolition, the intersections of race, gender, and class, and international solidarity with Palestine. Her books include Freedom Is a Constant Struggle; Are Prisons Obsolete?; Women, Race, and Class; and an autobiography. She is the subject of the acclaimed documentary Free Angela and All Political Prisoners and is distinguished professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Nikole Hannah-Jones is a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter covering racial injustice for the New York Times Magazine and creator of the landmark 1619 Project. In 2017, she received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for her work on educational inequality. She has also won a Peabody Award, two George Polk Awards, three National Magazine Awards, and the 2018 John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism from Columbia University. In 2016, she co-founded the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, a training and mentorship organization geared toward increasing the number of investigative reporters of color. She is the Knight Chair in Race and Journalism at Howard University, where she has founded the Center for Journalism and Democracy. In 2021, she was named one of Time’s 100 most influential people in the world.

The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from the New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the four hundredth anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It is led by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, along with New York Times Magazine editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein and editors Ilena Silverman and Caitlin Roper.

About the Narrators

Dion Graham is an award-winning narrator named a “Golden Voice” by AudioFile magazine. He has been a recipient of the prestigious Audie Award numerous times, as well as Earphones Awards, the Publishers Weekly Listen Up Awards, IBPA Ben Franklin Awards, and the ALA Odyssey Award. He was nominated in 2015 for a Voice Arts Award for Outstanding Narration. He is also a critically acclaimed actor who has performed on Broadway, off Broadway, internationally, in films, and in several hit television series. He is a graduate of Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts, with an MFA degree in acting.

Ron Butler is a Los Angeles–based actor, Earphones Award–winning audiobook narrator, and voice artist with over a hundred film and television credits. Most kids will recognize him from the three seasons he spent on Nickelodeon’s True Jackson, VP. He works regularly as a commercial and animation voice-over artist and has voiced a wide variety of audiobooks. He is a member of the Atlantic Theater Company and an Independent Filmmaker Project Award winner for his work in the HBO film Everyday People.

Robin Miles, named a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine, has twice won the prestigious Audie Award for Best Narration, an Audie Award for directing, and many Earphones Awards. Her film and television acting credits include The Last Days of Disco, Primary Colors, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Law & Order, New York Undercover, National Geographic’s Tales from the Wild, All My Children, and One Life to Live. She regularly gives seminars to members of SAG and AFTRA actors’ unions, and in 2005 she started Narration Arts Workshop in New York City, offering audiobook recording classes and coaching. She holds a BA degree in theater studies from Yale University, an MFA in acting from the Yale School of Drama, and a certificate from the British American Drama Academy in England.