The Concise King (Abridged) Audiobook

About the Authors

Clayborne Carson, PhD, was a participant and observer of African American political movements during his undergraduate years at UCLA. Since receiving his doctorate in 1975, he has taught at Stanford University, where he is now professor of history and director of the King Papers Project. He has also been a visiting professor at American University, the University of California, Berkeley, and Emory University and a fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. His scholarly publications have focused on African American protest movements and the political thought of the period after World War II. His writings have appeared in leading historical journals and numerous encyclopedias, as well as in popular periodicals. His first book, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s, won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award of the Organization of American Historians. Dr. Carson has lectured at many colleges and universities in the United States and abroad on a wide range of topics, including King, Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party, Black-Jewish relations, and the need for a multi-cultural curriculum.

Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) was born in Atlanta, Georgia, the son and grandson of pastors. He graduated from Morehouse College and Crozer Theological Seminary, becoming the pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama at age twenty-five. He subsequently earned his PhD from Boston University. In 1957, he and other civil rights leaders founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization he led until his death. A proponent of Gandhian principles of nonviolence, he led many protests and demonstrations for civil rights, including the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 29, 1963, where he delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Winner of the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, he continued to fight for civil rights, the eradication of poverty, and the end of the Vietnam War. He was assassinated on April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee.

About the Narrators

Edward M. Kennedy (1932–2009) represented Massachusetts in the United States Senate for forty-seven years, making him one of the longest-serving senators in American history. In 2004 he began interviews at the Miller Center of the University of Virginia for an oral history project about his life. For his 2009 memoir, True Compass, he drew from his fifty years of contemporaneous notes from his personal diaries and worked closely on the book with Pulitzer Prize winner Ron Powers, coauthor of Flags of Our Fathers and author of Mark Twain: A Life.

Simon Vance (a.k.a. Robert Whitfield) is an award-winning actor and narrator. He has earned more than fifty Earphones Awards and won the prestigious Audie Award for best narration thirteen times. He was named Booklist’s very first Voice of Choice in 2008 and has been named an AudioFile Golden Voice as well as an AudioFile Best Voice of 2009. He has narrated more than eight hundred audiobooks over almost thirty years, beginning when he was a radio newsreader for the BBC in London. He is also an actor who has appeared on both stage and television.

Tavia Gilbert is an acclaimed narrator of more than four hundred full-cast and multivoice audiobooks for virtually every publisher in the industry. Named the 2018 Voice of Choice by Booklist magazine, she is also winner of the prestigious Audie Award for best narration. She has earned numerous Earphones Awards, a Voice Arts Award, and a Listen-Up Award. Audible.com has named her a Genre-Defining Narrator: Master of Memoir. In addition to voice acting, she is an accomplished producer, singer, and theater actor. She is also a producer, singer, photographer, and a writer, as well as the cofounder of a feminist publishing company, Animal Mineral.

Bryan Kennedy was born and raised on Long Island and has been working as an actor and comedian in New York for the past several years. He has done numerous theater productions, voiceovers, commercials, and audiobooks.

Andrew Young earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a law degree at the Wake Forest University School of Law. He served as a volunteer for John Edwards’ winning campaign for US Senate. Hired in 1999, Young became Edwards’ longest serving and most trusted aide. He raised more than $10 million for the politician’s various causes and played a key role in Edwards’ efforts to become president of the United States. Now a private citizen, he lives in Chapel Hill with his wife and their three children.

Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) was born in Atlanta, Georgia, the son and grandson of pastors. He graduated from Morehouse College and Crozer Theological Seminary, becoming the pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama at age twenty-five. He subsequently earned his PhD from Boston University. In 1957, he and other civil rights leaders founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization he led until his death. A proponent of Gandhian principles of nonviolence, he led many protests and demonstrations for civil rights, including the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 29, 1963, where he delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Winner of the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, he continued to fight for civil rights, the eradication of poverty, and the end of the Vietnam War. He was assassinated on April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee.

Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) was born in Atlanta, Georgia, the son and grandson of pastors. He graduated from Morehouse College and Crozer Theological Seminary, becoming the pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama at age twenty-five. He subsequently earned his PhD from Boston University. In 1957, he and other civil rights leaders founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization he led until his death. A proponent of Gandhian principles of nonviolence, he led many protests and demonstrations for civil rights, including the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 29, 1963, where he delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Winner of the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, he continued to fight for civil rights, the eradication of poverty, and the end of the Vietnam War. He was assassinated on April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee.

Coretta Scott King (1927–2006) was an American civil rights activist, international human rights champion, author, the wife of Martin Luther King Jr., and the mother of four.

Coretta Scott King (1927–2006) was an American civil rights activist, international human rights champion, author, the wife of Martin Luther King Jr., and the mother of four.

Edoardo Ballerini, an American actor, director, film producer, and multiaward–winning narrator. He has won several Audie Awards for best narration, including for 2019’s Best Male Narrator of the Year. He was named by Booklist as winner of their 2023 Voice of Choice Award, and was named a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine in 2019. He has narrated over two hundred audiobooks, from classics to modern masters, from bestsellers to the inspirational, from Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners to spine-tingling series, and much more. In television and film, he is best known for his roles in A Murder at the End of the World, The Sopranos, 24, I Shot Andy Warhol, Dinner Rush, and Romeo Must Die. He is also trained in theater and continues to do much work on stage.