In conjunction with LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana, Letters Read brings you this first of four, mini podcasts on the early days of HIV|AIDS.This segment is based on original source material from the 1990s ACT UP organization, here. These ACT UP New Orleans records, from the second, local itiration, were collected, and stored, by Mark Gonzalez.…

Allow us to introduce the 2024 mini-series of letters and documents from the early days of HIV|AIDS. A late 20th century crisis. Most of the material is New Orleans in particular, Louisiana, and then the country at large. This mini-series is produced in partnership with the LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana and I thank them for their diligence pr…

Listen to this clip from an interview with Jarret Lofstead whose role it was to wade through, and strategically process, thousands, and thousands, of pages of court documents building the Letters Read narrative for the Jospehine Louise Newcomb readings. Lofstead is a writer/researcher and producer at The Bend Media + Productions. Whose recent relea…

Recorded Saturday, April 13 2024 in front of a live audience at Catapult in New Orleans. Featured Readers: Emcee Chris Kamenstein, Director Nancy Sharon Collins, Shadow Angelina Starkey, and Robert Valley. H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College was established by Josephine Louise Monnier Newcomb (“Jo”) as she was called, 1816 to 1901) as a memorial to …

This production was created from material collected during the creation of Drugs, Sex, Rock & Roll: A Year of Magic and Wonder. Which coincided with the project’s director/writer’s move back from New York to New Orleans. Quoting from the script, Collins’s observation was that moving home was “kind of like sleeping with an old lover.” Meanwhile, sig…

Listen to this iteration of an oft-told tale. How easily an innocent out of towner is drawn to the dark side of New Orleans. This specific story, ca. 1985, focuses on one year, one incredibly transformative year. For one man. Emblematic of many lured to the Big Easy, a famously lurid city. Counter intuitively, this potentially tragic tale resolves …

Continuing our New York/New Orleans journey, we bring you the only project Robert Moses ever did in the Crescent City. Locally referred to as the ⁠Riverfront Expressway⁠. Robert Moses, the greatest builder New York has ever known, is so often credited with it. Even though it never happened. As frequently, he is also incorrectly blamed for the Claib…

Introducing Season 7. Letters Read director, stationer, Nancy Sharon Collins talks about this year’s theme: the two very different cities that she loves. And, a lagniappe as they say in south Louisiana. A little something extra to maybe pull at your heartstrings, just a little. Audio production is by Steve Chyzyk, ⁠Sonic Canvas Studio⁠.…

Premiering 6:00 pm EDT New Years’ Eve 2022, LEMONS TO LEMONADE. And available here thereafter. Finishing up the Lady Louisiana Artist series for 2022 is a true lemons to lemonade story. Magen Raine Gladden. Commercial artist. She was born into a hippy dirt road collective along River Road in South Louisiana with a lifetime of health challenges. Now…

As our name suggests, Letters Read focuses on letters. Personal and business. From institutional archives and special collections, private and commercial libraries. In addition to letters, in our programming, we read other forms of written correspondence. Like faxes, text messages, emails, and now this collection of letters literally picked up off …

Co-hosted by Neal Auction Company. Angela Gregory was born to the New Orleans intellectual white elite in 1903. A time when proper ladies accompanied their mother to country club tea. With her parent’s blessing, Angela took a different path. At an early age, she knew that she wanted to be an artist. Not just an artist, a sculptress in stone, to be …

First in the 2022 mini-series, Lady Louisiana Artist is letters and missives to and from eco-feminist artist, and Letters Read Executive Advisory Board member, Michel Varisco. Our subject in this recording creates photography, assemblages, and installations that bear witness to our relationship with nature as observed in architecture, engineered, a…

Wrapping-up the previous programming season, Doing Business in New Orleans, we present the story of Clay Shaw. On March 1, 1967, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison arrested him on conspiracy charges. Shaw was a beloved, successful, local businessman, and closeted queer man. On January 29, 1969, Garrison tried Shaw in Orleans Parish Criminal…

Wrapping-up the 2021 Doing Business in New Orleans season is a true, rags to riches story. Another incubator-style, informal production, with stuff found along the way. That may or may not fit into full-length Letters Read, Louisiana and New Orleans-centric, programming. This material surfaced while researching the Clay Shaw story. That story is po…

Premiering Thursday, November 25, letters and ephemera created in 1962 by a local professional association for graphic designers. If you liked the TV show, Mad Men, you’ll love the real thing, New Orleans-style. Art Directors and Designers Association of New Orleans (ADDA) was chartered in 1961. Illustrators, lettering artists, art directors, photo…

As prelude to the Thanksgiving, 2021 reading, we share advertising executive Ron Thomson's story about the letter he wrote to motion picture actress, Audrey Hepburn, and the friendship that ensued. Thomson is President - Marketing, Beuerman Miller Fitzgerald, Inc. The oldest agency in the southern United States. By the time they met, Hepburn had al…

Welcome to this reading from a handmade, 1906 photo-album compiled in response to the last documented yellow fever outbreak in New Orleans and the United States. The podcast is fourteenth in the ongoing, Letters Read project. Readers are William Bowling and Grace Kennedy with audio production by Steve Chyzyk and Sonic Canvas Studio. Antenna is the …

As a bit of comic relief to the July 15th, 2021 podcast, "Bananas Anyone", Letters Read project director Nancy Sharon Collins puts forth her science fiction theory to her neighbor, microbiology scholar Claiborne Christian, Ph.D., Tulane University, New Orleans. The following snippet was recorded on her deck, during a typical, New Orleans thundersto…

This reading is of personal letters from Edgar Degas surrounding his 4-month stay in Reconstruction-era New Orleans. Christopher Kamenstein reads as Degas; audio production is by Steve Chyzyk and Sonic Canvas studio. The event is emceed by stationer and Letters Read director Nancy Sharon Collins. Join us here for an intimate listen to thoughts and …

A prelude to the March 25, 2021 reading, The Letters of Edgar Degas, hosted by Pitot House and co-promoted by Alliance Française de La Nouvelle-Orléans. Michel is Edgar Degas’s maternal uncle. Pitot House was once owned by Degas's maternal grandmother. In this reading, Michel writes of his son, Eugene Henri, 9 years of age, whose illness and death …

December 31st, 2020: A remote interview with two professional actors, George Saucier and Colin Miller in Lafayette, Louisiana. With ten questions as a format, this production threads excerpts from a two-hour conversation between George and Colin about being an actor, theatre as an art form, ruminations about Tennessee Williams, the Southern Gothic …

This outtake is from the 16th full LETTERS READ production, to be podcast here on New Year’s Eve this year. George Saucier talks about the theatricality of southern archetypes while Collin Miller responds. Intended for a March 2020 reading, from which the full-production and this snippet evolved, this event was to restage the 2018 Letters Read scri…

Yesterday, the number of people with the coronavirus who died in the United States exceeded 300,000. Today we offer another incubator-style, experimental reading from primary source material: Excerpted letters from Baron Joseph-Xavier Delfau de Pontalba written from New Orleans during the first documented Yellow Fever epidemic there. It was recorde…

November 30, 2020, hosted by Bastion | Community of Resilience, Gentilly, New Orleans. Featuring William Bowling, reader, Steve Chyzyk, and Steve Himelfarb, audio producers. Robert, “Bob” Stuart was born in 1923, just three years after women in this country were allowed to vote. Originally from Shreveport, Louisiana. He served in the Navy during WW…

Thursday, August 20, 2020: Blanchard, “Skip” Ward was a gay activist in rural Louisiana during the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and into the beginning of the 21st century. His home was in Pineville. Skip became increasingly involved in LGBTQIA activism in the early 1980s when he first came out. Or, as he would have phrased it, “came up front” about his sex…

The 14th Letters Read event and first produced entirely as a podcast. The usual, live reading was scheduled for March 26, 2020 at Frenchman Art & Books on Frenchmen Street in New Orleans. It was preempted by the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak. Listen to Dylan Hunter as the voice of our subject. Rebecca Hollingsworth is Anne. Both self-recorded …

As an experiment with potential material for LETTERS READ, this was the first in a series of live recordings for the 2020 programming season. A work in progress, this set of letters developed into the April, 2020 podcast of Stewart Butler letters.The letters in both readings were from a large wooden chest in Butler’s home, the Faerie Playhouse. A L…

Wednesday, September 25, 2019 The Cabildo Louisiana State Museum The Louisiana Museum Foundation, Louisiana State Museum, Letters Read, Antenna, and stationer Nancy Sharon Collins bring an intimate, performative evening celebrating our love for history and architecture, and a unique understanding of our relationship with property. A special reading…

Saturday, July 20, 2019 6:00 to 7:30 pm Crescent City Books 124 Baronne Street, New Orleans, across from the Roosevelt Hotel. Thanks to Susan Larson and George Ingmire for this recording and including it on their show, Thinking Outside the Book on New Orleans Public Radio. ABC@PM, Crescent City Books, and LETTERS READ present a second open mic nigh…

Sunday November 25, 2018 3:30 to 5:00pm St. John the Baptist Catholic Church 1139 Oretha Castle Haley Blvd. New Orleans, LA. Twenty years ago, a Northshore, LA developer worked with New Orleans Mayor Morial, two City Council members and two Central City clergymen to demolish a 4-square city block area between St. Mary and Polymnia streets, Baronne …

Wednesday, February 13, 2019 6:00 to 7:30 pm Nora Navra Library, 1902 St. Bernard Avenue Free and open to the public. Mack Guillory III, Emcee. Julie Dietz, Reader. The historic fight for civil rights in New Orleans is more complicated than most movements in the other 49 United States. Prior to Reconstruction, and the Jim Crow era, free people of c…

Though Janet Mary Riley did not define herself as a second wave feminist, by today’s standards, she was a quiet but fierce civil rights advocate and tireless women’s rights activist.Throughout her life, she fought for equal pay in the workplace.This event is dedicated to her successful efforts to revise Louisiana’s community property laws giving wo…

As part of researching the world of Tennessee Williams and his later life living, part-time, in New Orleans French Quarter, LETTERS READ producer Nancy Sharon Collins interviewed Dorian Bennett. Williams befriended Bennett in the 1980s, This is an edited moment from that interview. Image: 722 Toulouse Street, ca. 1930s: A photo of 722 Toulouse Stre…

Welcome to LETTERS READ, sixth in the series of live events in which local artists interpret personal letters written by culturally vital individuals from various times and New Orleans communities presented by stationer Nancy Sharon Collins and Antenna.Thanks to New Orleans Tennessee Williams Literary Festival and especially to Susan Larson whose i…

Welcome to PART II of LETTERS READ: Text Dating. This is sixth in the ongoing series of live events in which local artists interpret personal letters written by culturally vital individuals from various times and New Orleans communities presented by me, Nancy Sharon Collins, and Antenna.Thanks go to Antenna, Press Street, Paper Machine! If you don’…

Welcome to PART I in the fifth installment of LETTERS READ. The ongoing series of live events in which local artists interpret personal letters written by culturally vital individuals from various times and New Orleans communities presented by me, Nancy Sharon Collins, and Antenna.Thanks to Antenna, Press Street, Paper Machine, and to contributors …

When Peter Rogers was a young man, he moved from Hattiesburg, MS, to Manhattan. He was so poor he took in a roommate to help share the rent. Introduced by fellow Hattiesburg-ites back home, Peter's roommate was non other than Jim Adams, Tennessee Williams’s cousin. In this short, Rogers recalls the evening Williams breezed into town, treated them t…

Through live readings of letters written during War I and World War II, LETTERS READ: Veterans Day presented little moments where lives of military service members and civilians intersected. The November 11, 2017 reading focused on love letters from The National World War II Museum, letters from United States Army Air Force officer Francis I. Cerva…