Sports Poetry Audiobook

About the Authors

Xe Sands has more than a decade of experience bringing stories to life through narration, performance, and visual art, including recordings of the Nightwalkers series from Jaquelyn Frank. She has received several honors, including AudioFile Earphones Awards and a coveted Audie Award, and she was named Favorite Debut Romance Narrator of 2011 in the Romance Audiobooks poll.

Richard Mitchley is an actor and narrator who has appeared in Auf Wiedersehen, Pet…, The Black Adder, and Doctor Who. 

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) was born of Irish parentage in Scotland. He studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, but he also had a passion for storytelling. His first book introduced that prototype of the modern detective in fiction, Sherlock Holmes. Despite the immense popularity Holmes gained throughout the world, Doyle was not overly fond of the character and preferred to write other stories. Eventually popular demand won out and he continued to satisfy readers with the adventures of the legendary sleuth. He also wrote historical romances and made two essays into pseudoscientific fantasy: The Lost World and The Poison Belt.

John Banister Tabb (1845-1909) was an American poet, Catholic priest, and professor of English who descended from one of the oldest and wealthiest Virginian families. He was ordained in 1884 and retained his academic position teaching Greek and English at St. Charles College in Maryland. Father Tabb was widely published in popular and prestigious magazines, including Harper’s Monthly and The Atlantic Monthly. He had been plagued with poor eyesight since childhood and eventually became completely blind.

Ghizela Rowe has worked in broadcast television for thirty years on a broad range of programming. Her specialization is in music. She helps run the Copyright Group, an extensive collection of master recording rights, and has lent her voice to many audiobooks, including The Poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Gaskell: The Short Stories, and The Romantics: An Introduction.

Jane Austen (1775–1817) is considered by many scholars to be the first great woman novelist. Born in Steventon, England, she later moved to Bath and began to write for her own and her family’s amusement. Her novels, set in her own English countryside, depict the daily lives of provincial middle-class families with wry observation, a delicate irony, and a good-humored wit.

Lord Byron (1788-1824), as the English poet George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron Byron is commonly known, was the most flamboyant and notorious of the Romantics and a leader of the era’s poetic revolution. While pursuing a unconventional lifestyle of international travel, risqué love affairs, and general debauchery, he produced massive amounts of beautiful, emotion-stirring works. He died at the young age of 36 after falling ill while commanding Greek troops in a fight for independence from the Ottoman Empire.

Though Lord Byron was refused the honor of a burial at Westminster Abbey, as was custom for someone of his stature, his memorial stone was finally placed in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in 1969.

About the Narrators

Ghizela Rowe has worked in broadcast television for thirty years on a broad range of programming. Her specialization is in music. She helps run the Copyright Group, an extensive collection of master recording rights, and has lent her voice to many audiobooks, including The Poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Gaskell: The Short Stories, and The Romantics: An Introduction.

Richard Mitchley is an actor and narrator who has appeared in Auf Wiedersehen, Pet…, The Black Adder, and Doctor Who.