Our Response to the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Outbreak

As a precaution to help limit the spread of coronavirus (COVID-19) and care for our community, Just Buffalo Literary Center has postponed a number of events, and we will follow the guidance of Buffalo Public Schools in terms of Just Buffalo Writing Center programming.

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Kiese Laymon - BABEL - April 25 2024 - Just Buffalo Literary Center

BABEL: Kiese Laymon

Join Just Buffalo Literary Center for an evening with award-winning author Kiese Laymon.

Tickets

Individual BABEL event tickets include a ticket for in-person attendance at Kleinhans Music Hall, as well as a virtual link to view from home via Livestream. All tickets will be issued via the Kleinhans/BPO website for the 2023–2024 season.

  • General Admission: $42 each
  • General Admission with Library Card: $37 each
  • VIP Patron: $102 each (includes catered pre-event reception attended by the featured author and preferred seating)
  • Student: $12 each (must present a valid Student ID at events)

NOTE: Currently, proof of COVID-19 vaccination is not required for entry to BABEL events. We will continue to monitor health & safety recommendations and communicate any changes or updates to ticketholders as necessary. Please note that we are unable to provide refunds for tickets.

Planning on Watching from Home?

  • If you choose to watch from home instead of attending in-person, the virtual link will be sent to you from babel@justbuffalo.org.
  • You must be signed up for the Just Buffalo Newsletter in order to receive the virtual link. (To sign up, opt-in during the checkout process, or use the form in the footer of the website.)
  • Ticket purchases made after 3:45pm EDT on October 26 will not receive a livestream link. But don’t worry if you miss it—you will also be granted access to a password-protected event recording, which will be emailed to you within 48 hours of the event.
  • Click here to purchase VIRTUAL ONLY TICKETS

Date

Thursday, April 25, 2024
Expired!

Time

Doors & VIP Patron Receptions at 7:00 p.m. | Events at 8:00 p.m.
8:00 pm

More Info

GET TICKETS

Location

Kleinhans Music Hall & Online
3 Symphony Circle, Buffalo, NY 14201 (Free Parking) / Online via Livestream

Organizer

Buffalo and Erie County Public Library
Buffalo and Erie County Public Library
Website
https://www.buffalolib.org

Other Organizers

Just Buffalo Literary Center
Just Buffalo Literary Center
Phone
(716) 832-5400
Email
info@justbuffalo.org

Featured Artist

  • Kiese Laymon
    Kiese Laymon
    Author, Educator

    Kiese Laymon is a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. In his observant, often hilarious work, Laymon does battle with the personal and the political: race and family, body and shame, poverty and place. His savage humor and clear-eyed perceptiveness have earned him comparisons to Ta-Nehisi Coates, Alice Walker, and Mark Twain. He is the author of the award-winning memoir Heavy, the groundbreaking essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, and the genre-defying novel Long Division.

    Laymon’s memoir Heavy won the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the 2018 Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, the Austen Riggs Erikson Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media, and was named one of the Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years by The New York Times.

    A personal narrative that illuminates national failures, Heavy is defiant yet vulnerable—an insightful, often comical exploration of weight, identity, art, friendship, and family.

    The recipient of an NAACP Image Award for fiction, Laymon is the Libby Shearn Moody Professor of English and Creative Writing at Rice University. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022.

    Heavy: An American Memoir

    *Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, NPR, Broadly, Buzzfeed (Nonfiction), The Undefeated, Library Journal (Biography/Memoirs), The Washington Post (Nonfiction), Southern Living (Southern), Entertainment Weekly, and The New York Times Critics*

    In this powerful, provocative, and universally lauded memoir—winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal and finalist for the Kirkus Prize—genre-bending essayist and novelist Kiese Laymon “provocatively meditates on his trauma growing up as a black man, and in turn crafts an essential polemic against American moral rot” (Entertainment Weekly).

    In Heavy, Laymon writes eloquently and honestly about growing up a hard-headed black son to a complicated and brilliant black mother in Jackson, Mississippi. From his early experiences of sexual violence, to his suspension from college, to time in New York as a college professor, Laymon charts his complex relationship with his mother, grandmother, anorexia, obesity, sex, writing, and ultimately gambling. Heavy is a “gorgeous, gutting… generous” (The New York Times) memoir that combines personal stories with piercing intellect to reflect both on the strife of American society and on Laymon’s experiences with abuse. By attempting to name secrets and lies he and his mother spent a lifetime avoiding, he asks us to confront the terrifying possibility that few in this nation actually know how to responsibly love, and even fewer want to live under the weight of actually becoming free.

    “A book for people who appreciated Roxane Gay’s memoir Hunger” (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel), Heavy is defiant yet vulnerable, an insightful, often comical exploration of weight, identity, art, friendship, and family through years of haunting implosions and long reverberations. “You won’t be able to put [this memoir] down… It is packed with reminders of how black dreams get skewed and deferred, yet are also pregnant with the possibility that a kind of redemption may lie in intimate grappling with black realities” (The Atlantic).

    Get the Reading Guide

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