Actor Don Cheadle won the Grammy Award for best spoken word album for his narration of an audiobook by the late civil rights legend Rep. John Lewis.
Cheadle took home the prize for Carry On: Reflections for a New Generation From John Lewis, published last July by Grand Central. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus called the book “a bright, morally unwavering worldview from an exemplary human being.”
Cheadle beat out four other nominees for the award, including two other audiobook narrators: LeVar Burton, who earned a nod for reading his 1997 science fiction novel, Aftermath, and former President Barack Obama, nominated for the narration of his autobiography A Promised Land.
Burton previously won the award in 2000 for reading The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr., and Obama won in 2006 for narrating his Dreams From My Father, and again in 2008 for The Audacity of Hope.
Cheadle is also a repeat Grammy winner, having been honored in 2017 in the best compilation soundtrack for visual media category as a producer of Miles Ahead, the soundtrack to his 2015 film about Miles Davis. He was also nominated in the spoken word category in 2004 for narrating the audiobook version of Walter Mosley’s novel Fear Itself.
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
