b. 1889, Odessa, Ukraine
d. 1966, Moscow, Russia

Russian poet. Cofounder, with life-long friend Osip Mandelstam, of Acmeism literary movement. Banned for opposition to Stalin. Widow and mother of executed and imprisoned dissidents. Author of Requiem (1935-40, first published in 1963).
 

Anna Akhmatova as read by Carolyn Forché and Nicholas Jenkins.

b. 1820, Adams, Massachusetts
d. 1906 Rochester, New York

Author, lecturer, abolitionist, teacher, leading figure in the women's voting rights movement. Head of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. In 1872, Anthony voted illegally in the presidential election. Arrested and fined $100, which she never paid. Abolitionist campaigner.

 

Susan B. Anthony as read by Jorie Graham.

b. 1906, Hanover, Germany
d. 1975, New York, New York

Philosopher, journalist, educator, author. Imprisoned by the Nazis in 1933, exiled in Paris until subsequent refugee to the United States. Author of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Friend of Benjamin, Buber, Bearden, and Auden.



Hannah Arendt as read by Homi Bhabha and Carol Gilligan.

b. 1907, York, United Kingdom
d. 1973, Vienna, Austria

Poet, essayist, editor, librettist, anthologist, anti-Fascist author of Spain (1937) and September 1, 1939 (1939). Elegist of Yeats. Friend of Arendt. 



WH Auden as read by Fareed Zakaria and Julian Gerwitz.

b. 1924, New York, New York
d. 1987, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France

Novelist, essayist, playwright, social and cultural critic, leading voice in the civil rights movement. At the time of his death, Baldwin was working on a biography of Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, and Malcolm X. Friend of Toni Morrison.


 

James Baldwin as read by Darren Walker, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Colm Tóibín, and Uzodinma Iweala.

b. 1906, Foxrock, Ireland
d. 1989, Paris, France

Irish playwright, novelist, and poet. Active member of the French Resistance (Réseau Gloria SMH). Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969 “for his writing, in which—in new forms for the novel and drama—the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation.” Catastrophe (1982) dedicated to the incarcerated Václav Havel.


Samuel Beckett as read by J.M. Coetzee.

b. 1946, Tarkastad, South Africa
d. 1977, Pretoria, South Africa

Anti-Apartheid leader. Founder of Black Consciousness Movement, South African Students’ Organization, and the Black People’s Convention. Beaten to death in detention by the South African Police in 1977. Posthumous publication of collected writings, I Write What I Like (1978). Friend of Richard Turner.


 

Stephen Biko as read by Sipokazi Madida.

b. 1907, Springdale, Pennsylvania
d. 1964, Silver Spring, Maryland

Marine biologist, author, pioneer conservationist, researcher. Activist author of Silent Spring (1962), responsible for environmental legislation and eventual formation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).


 

Rachel Carson as read by by Matt Aucoin, John Kerry, Elaine Scarry, Bill McKibben, and Michael Pollan.
 

b. 1920, Cernăuți, Romania
d. 1970, Paris, France

Poet, translator, teacher, exile. Holocaust survivor. Author of the poem Todesfuge (1948) and other works that revolutionized the postwar German language. Friend of poet Nelly Sachs. Translator of Osip Mandelstam, Robert Desnos, and Aimé Césaire.


 

Paul Celan as read by Carolyn Forché and Jorie Graham.

b. 1839, Aix-en-Provence, France
d. 1906, Aix-en-Provence, France

Revolutionary post-Impressionist painter, resistant to academic or bourgeois conventions. Predecessor of Cubism.

 

Paul Cézanne as read by Peter Sacks.

b. 1818, Talbot County, Maryland
d. 1895, Washington, D.C.


Escaped slave. Leading abolitionist speaker, author, editor, activist. Author of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845).

 

Frederick Douglass as read by Teju Cole.

b. 1818, Talbot County, Maryland
d. 1895, Washington, D.C.


Escaped slave. Leading abolitionist speaker, author, editor, activist. Author of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845).

 

Frederick Douglass as read by Teju Cole.

b. 1910, Orihuela, Spain
d. 1942, Alicante, Spain

Anti-fascist poet, playwright, soldier and political prisoner during Spanish Cuvil War, died in custody. His last verse on the wall of the prison hospital: “Goodbye, brothers, comrades, friends: let me take my leave of the sun and the fields.” Some of his verses were kept by his jailers.  Author of Lullaby of the Onion.

Miguel Hernandez as read by Jane Miller.
 

b. 1929, Atlanta, Georgia
d. 1968, Memphis, Tennessee

Reverend Doctor. Civil rights leader. Principal member of the NAACP, head of nonviolent Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Awarded Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. Assassinated April 4, 1968.



Martin Luther King Jr. as read by Bryan Stevenson.

b. 1956, Toototobi, Amazonas, Brazil

Yanomami shaman, human and environmental rights activist, author of The Falling Sky (2010). Major spokesperson for the Yanomami people resisting genocide and ecological destruction of their lands.


Davi Kopenawa as read by Jorie Graham.

b. 1919, Turin, Italy
d. 1987, Turin, Italy

Author, chemist, anti-fascist partisan, survivor and chronicler of Auschwitz. Author of If This is a Man (1947) and The Periodic Table (1975).

 

Primo Levi as read by Carolyn Forché, Stephen Greenblatt, and Teju Cole.

b. 1934, New York, New York
d. 1992, Saint Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands

Poet, author, feminist, civil rights and anti-war activist. Author of The Black Unicorn (1978) and Sister Outsider (1984).



Audre Lorde as read by Carol Gilligan, Victoria Chang, Tracy K. Smith, and Robyn Schiff.

b. 1940, Ihithe, Kenya
d. 2011, Nairobi, Kenya

Political activist, leader of human rights and environmental movement, author, teacher, politician. Founder of the Green Belt Movement.



Wangari Maathai as read by Terry Tempest Williams.

b. 1918, Mvezo, South Africa
d. 2013, Johannesburg, South Africa

Leading anti-Apartheid activist, political prisoner (1962–90). President of African National Congress (ANC) from 1991 to 1997. President of South Africa from 1994 to 1999. Awarded Nobel Peace Prize in 1993. Associate of Tambo, Sisulu, and Sachs. Influenced by Gandhi.



Nelson Mandela as read by Margaret Marshall and Kweku Mandela.

b. 1891, Warsaw, Poland
d. 1938, Vladivostok, Russia

Poet, denouncer of Stalin, internal exile and prisoner, died in detention. Friend of Anna Akhmatova. Translated by Paul Celan. Influence on Seamus Heaney, Zbigniew Herbert, and Czesław Miłosz.



Osip Mandelstam as read by Jane Miller and Teju Cole.

b. 1976, Butyn, Russia

Lawyer, anti-corruption activist, filmmaker, imprisoned leader of opposition to Vladimir Putin. Survived assassination attempt in 2020. Sentenced to nine years in a maximum-security penal colony. Subject of the documentary Navalny.



Alexei Navalny as read by Alexei Navalny.

b. 1926, Baltimore, Maryland
d. 1966, Mastic Beach, New York

Poet, essayist, curator at Museum of Modern Art, prominent member of the “New York School.” 



Frank O'Hara as read by Julian Gerwitz.

b. 1858, Manchester, United Kingdom
d. 1928, London, United Kingdom

Radical suffragette, political prisoner, hunger striker. Founder of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) and Women’s Franchise League.



Emmeline Pankhurst as read by Emily Galvin-Almanza and Honor Moore.

b. 1913, Tuskegee, Alabama
d. 2005, Detroit, Michigan

Activist in American civil rights movement, Montgomery bus boycott. Honored by U.S. Congress as “first lady of civil rights” and “mother of the freedom movement.”



Rosa Parks as read by Bryan Stevenson and Carolyn Forché.

b. 1891, Berlin, Germany
d. 1970, Stockholm, Sweden

Poet, Nobel Prize 1966.  Close friend and correspondent of Paul Celan. Selected poem, O The Chimneys (1947), translated by Michael Hamburger.



Nelly Sachs as read by Amy Hempel.

b. 1963, Langarud, Iran

Prominent human rights lawyer and activist in defending civil liberties and women’s rights. Political prisoner, hunger striker, currently in prison. Associate of Farhad Meysami. Subject of the film Nasrin (2020).




Nasrin Sotoudeh as read by Olivia Coleman.

b. 1797, Ulster County, New York
d. 1883, Battle Creek, Michigan

Abolitionist, orator, activist for civil and women’s rights. Escaped slavery at age 28. Delivered her “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech at the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron in 1851. When anti-abolitionists threatened to burn down her rally venue in Angola, Indiana, she said, “Then I will speak upon the ashes.”




Sojourner Truth as read by Tracy K. Smith.

b. 1820, Dorchester Country, Maryland
d. 1913, Auburn, New York

Escaped from slavery in 1849. Abolitionist, scout, spy, nurse, soldier, iconic leader, and conductor of the Underground Railroad.




Harriet Tubman as read by Tracy K. Smith and Carol Gilligan.

b. 1881 Zhou Zhangshou, China
d. 1936 Shanghai, China

Essayist, poet, short story writer, editor, literary critic, designer. Foundational figure of modern Chinese literature. Writing in vernacular Chinese and classical Chinese. Leader of the League of Left-Wing Writers in Shanghai during republican era China (1912-1949). Refused to join the Communist Party of China.



Lu Xun as read by Yangyang Chen.

b. 1882, London, United Kingdom
d. 1941, Lewes, United Kingdom

Novelist, short-story writer, essayist, reviewer, editor, publisher, anti-patriarchal supporter of women’s rights. Author of Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), A Room of One’s Own (1929), The Waves (1931), Three Guineas (1938), and Between the Acts (1941).




Virginia Woolf by as read by Louis Menand, Kamran Javadizadeh, Claire Messud, and Carol Gilligan.

b. 1978, Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine

President of Ukraine. Wartime leader of resistance to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.




Volodymyr Zelensky as read by Volodymyr Zelenskyy.