What is Toddling the Stacks?
We’re a weekly children’s literature podcast that helps you find new picture book favorites for you and your kid! Watch us on YouTube or listen on your podcast app of choice. Keep up with us on Facebook, Insta, and BlueSky! If you like what you hear, leave us a review!
Who is Toddling the Stacks?
This is us, aren’t we adorable?
I’m Sean, TTS‘ show-runner and host. I’m a recently minted PhD in English Literature (who is on the job market, if you’re hiring!). I did my undergraduate at Penn, graduating summa cum laude with departmental honors and with a few essay awards under my belt. My masters and professional degree both come from Princeton, where I focused on Victorian literature at the intersection of the Environmental Humanities and the History of the Book. The Graduate School awarded me with their highly prestigious, if simply named, Teaching Award in 2025. Those are my bona fides, but I’m also just a regular guy: a first-generation, low-income student who attended community college and struggles with his weight. Importantly, I’m also a doting father who loves reading to his kid!
Julie, Addy’s super mommy and my wife, works in healthcare and helps with the social media accounts. Adalyn, who you know from our cold intros, helps with content selection!
Why is Toddling the Stacks?
I harbor a few core hopes for this project that might be labeled “calls to action”:
- I want you to spend quality time reading to your child
- I want you to support your local library
- I want you to have an easier time finding great books at the library
And, my nefarious side quests:
- I want to help you become more critical consumers of media
- I want you to be excited about this genre
- I want you to listen to the next episode!
This podcast is a public-facing project of the digital humanities, which is a bloated way of saying that I hope to use my education and expertise to make the experience of encountering literature more enriching for you and your family. Why anyone would need to attend university to study a language in which they’re already fluent has been a question since English-speaking universities introduced English literature courses. I believe that study has been invaluable. I also believe its fruits should be available to everyone. If you do, too, then this is the children’s literature podcast for you!
Where does Toddling the Stacks find its picture books and other children’s literature?
This is the million dollar question, right? We have a few methodologies:
- Curated “Best Of” and awards lists
- These prove the only time you might hear a negative review on the pod. Otherwise, it just makes more sense to focus on books you should read than ones you shouldn’t, right?
- Librarian recommendations
- The world runs on librarians, whether we recognize it or not. And they know their stuff. Whether it’s books they’ve chosen to display, through story time selections, or from conversations, librarians never steer us wrong!
- Pure random chance
- Every library trip, Addy gets to pick a handful of books entirely on her own, just by pulling it from the stacks. She’s surprisingly good at it!
- Brute force attacks
- We are constantly at our book borrowing limit. Addy is on pace to read 500 distinct books this year!
What’s a human-produced podcast?
This project eschews AI as much as possible. I can’t claim to be fully divested from it, because the line between traditional technologies and (allegedly) agentic ones is helplessly blurred. Is the noise gate I use to reduce the number of mastiff snores echoing through the background AI? Probably! However, all reading, writing, analysis, photography, and recording is done by me. When it comes to audio and video stuff, I’m entirely self-taught, so there will be moments of imperfection, and earlier episodes will probably be rawer than newer ones. I’d argue such moments are a gift, in these days.