The Stacks Tour!

The Stacks is a podcast about books and the ways they shape our cultural understandings. Hosted by Traci Thomas, a Black millennial woman who is asking the questions that provoke meaningful and hilarious conversations. Created in 2018, the show has over 1 million downloads, and has been featured in Elle Magazine, Oprah Magazine, Buzzfeed, and more.

VIP: To celebrate five years of The Stacks, we’re taking the show on the road to five cities across the U.S. Join Traci and guests for a night of bookish conversations, pop culture hot takes, unlimited reading recommendations, and of course a little snack discourse. Plus we’ll be joined by a local bookstore to make sure your to-be read list remains never ending.

We're offering a limited number of VIP tickets that include priority seating, a pre-show meet and greet and photo-op with Traci, and an exclusive VIP goodie bag. There are a limited number of VIP tickets, grab yours now.

Special Guest:

Kiese Laymon is a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. Laymon is the Libbie Shearn Moody Professor of English and Creative Writing at Rice University. Laymon is the author of Long Division, which won the 2022 NAACP Image Award for fiction, and the essay collection, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, named a notable book of 2021 by the New York Times critics. Laymon’s bestselling memoir, Heavy: An American Memoir, won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, the Barnes and Noble Discovery Award, the Austen Riggs Erikson Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media, and was named one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years by The New York Times. The audiobook, read by the author, was named the Audible 2018 Audiobook of the Year. Laymon is the recipient of 2020-2021 Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard. Laymon is at work on the books, Good God, and City Summer, Country Summer, and a number of other film and television projects. He is the founder of “The Catherine Coleman Literary Arts and Justice Initiative,” a program based out of the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University, aimed at aiding young people in Jackson get more comfortable reading, writing, revising and sharing on their own terms, in their own communities. Kiese Laymon was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022.