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SOUND TALENT NEWS

Voices to Know

AudioFile's newest showcase of award-winning narrators

EARPHONES R EPORT OCTOBER-DECEMBER 2024

Find the narrators who are getting the best reviews and coveted Earphones Awards.

AudioFile's updated Talent Guide gives expanded details on the audiobook experience and accomplishments of hundreds of narrators—includes contact information and pseudonyms.

Link directly to reviews and complete profiles of narrators creating exceptional audio.

EJ Lavery

Compelling first-person fiction is particularized by, among other essential performance qualities, the storyteller’s "emotional commitment to who I am." EJ Lavery captures this commitment (and bottles it) in her narration of CRUZITA AND THE MARIACHEROS and never lets it escape. The who Lavery actually captures is her adolescent protagonist, and her inherent sense that everything she encounters and subsequently feels—from remorse to joy to excitement—is just slightly larger than life. In this way, we are intimately connected to her teenage character’s "carbonated personality," to what makes her tick, which invites us into who Cruzita is, and invites us to root for her.

Complete Listing

Sean Patrick Hopkins

Sean Patrick Hopkins remains committed to the author’s three fundamental purposes throughout his narration of THE INSECT EPIPHANY: How Our Six-Legged Allies Shape Human Culture. His nonfiction storyteller’s persona is fully commensurate with the author’s intellectual and emotional purpose: to teach, to persuade, to connect! By mining the author’s sense of wonder, so evident in his language; by organically (believably) lavishing emphasis on salient words, phrases, concepts, things we need to know, things rooted in this entomologist’s passion for his subject, Hopkins persuades us to metaphorically lean in and be privy to the most amazing things about our world’s most amazing insect communities.

Complete Listing

Highlights of single-voice narrations getting recent

Earphones Awards:

Melanie Crawley : HALFMOON LANE
Kimberly Farr: TELL ME EVERYTHING
Hillary Huber: BAD LIAR
Elizabeth Knowelden: MILLIE FLEUR'S POISON GARDEN
Gail Shalan: THE SHUTOUTS

Helen Day

In EVERGREEN, Helen Day takes her fantastic children’s protagonist-squirrel—along with the other anthropomorphized creatures that inhabit magical Buckthorn Forest—seriously! Arguably, the fantasy-book narrator’s job-one is to remember that their characters, whether fire-breathing dragons or the gravel-voiced toad Evergreen meets early on, do not know they are fantasy characters. Yes, their language often appears exaggerated. That said, the storyteller’s challenge is to always recognize that these characters see themselves as eminently real. Day’s narration dimensionalizes her fantastic characters precisely because she takes them seriously, never "helps" the young listener by exaggerating the exaggeration. Rather, she allows each character to speak the author’s story from the heart.

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Rachel Fulginiti

Among the nonfiction storyteller’s performance "musts" is intuiting the author’s emotional purpose and communicating that feeling to listeners. Rachel Fulginiti consistently fulfills that mandate during her narration of UNTANGLING YOUR MARRIAGE: A Guide to Collaborative Divorce. Specifically, Fulginiti senses in the syntax this divorce-lawyer/author’s combination of sympathetic bedside manner and serious, professional expert. In this way, her storyteller connects listeners to the author’s intellectual ax-to-grind (the best possible divorce process) with straightforward—albeit comforting—emphasis, along with an even, slightly softened tone that suggests she is two feet from the listener: all of which creates her empathetic response to, as she says, “the intense emotions of divorce.”

Complete Listing

Narrators in ensemble narrations are also garnering Earphones Awards:

Erin Bennett: TO DIE FOR
Cary Hite: THE BEST AMERICAN FOOD & TRAVEL WRITING 2024
Elisabeth Rodgers: THE WILDES
Eunice Wong: THE BEST AMERICAN FOOD & TRAVEL WRITING 2024

And naturally, AudioFile's GOLDEN VOICE narrators rack up their share of Earphones Awards:

Edoardo Ballerini, January Lavoy, Johnny Heller, Soneela Nankani, Suzanne Toren

Sign up now for AudioFile's Audiobook Talent & Industry Guide include your listings with the best narrators in the industry. Audiobook skills and experience are foremost in this focused resource for audiobook voices.

Thanks to audiobook director Paul Alan Ruben for his contributions to Voices to Know.

Voices to Know Vol 7, 2025

The indispensable tool for audiobook professionals, librarians, and anyone wanting a comprehensive resource for the audiobook industry. Casting directors, producers, and publishers can search by name, specific vocal skills and dialects, listen to clips and find linked reviews of recent audiobook work.