LETTERS READ

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 the home of Butler’s home, the Faerie Playhouse. A Letters Read sponsor, the LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana, regularly met there.

We listen to a set of letters from 1967. Written to Butler, they were authored by Anne Garza. At the time these letters were accessed, Butler was 89. While his memory was crystal-clear on some points from his past, others eluded him. At the time of this recording, Stewart did not remember Anne yet continued sending $200 monthly to help support the widow of Greg Manella. Greg is also mentioned in this reading along with expectations and misgivings about being in a relationship in the middle of the last century. 

Wednesday, September 25, 2019

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 in which professional actors read and interpret contemporary and historic communications surrounding the current exhibit The Baroness de Pontalba & the Rise of Jackson Square at the Louisiana State Museum’s Cabildo.

This event weaves the legacy of Don Andrés Almonester (1728–1798), his formidable daughter, Micaela, the Baroness de Pontalba (1795–1874), and specific members of her descendant family into an exploration of our notions of property and property ownership.

Special guests include emcee Christopher Kamenstein and Grace Kennedy.

About the image: “Spanish Cabildo” by artist Jim Blanchard, 1992. From the exhibition The Baroness de Pontalba & The Rise of Jackson Square at the Cabildo, French Quarter, New Orleans. The drawing was lent by Paul St. Martin and photographed by Advocate staff photographer Chris Granger.

Saturday, July 20, 2019

ABC@PM, Crescent City Books, and LETTERS READ present a second open mic night for book nerds. CODEX is a conversation about the physicality and context of interacting with and using books. Attendees are encouraged to bring any book they’d like sharing! Loads of conversations about the interaction with and what is a book are a goal. 

Sunday November 25, 2018


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 and an altered Carondelet Streets. What was planned to replace historic, architecturally important homes was a suburban strip mall-style Albertsons grocery store more than 60,000 square feet large. Two of the four city blocks were planned to become a parking lot.


Locals and preservationists were in an uproar and a grand fight ensued.

This is the story of why and how Felicity Redevelopment began and how two women stopped the Albertsons project from being built.

Mack C. Guillory III, emcee.


Thanks to the generous support of Dorian Bennett and Felicity Redevelopment, Inc, the script for this event was recorded live in the vault of Crescent City Books.

Wednesday, February 13, 2019

Mack Guillory III, Emcee.

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 color here could legally own property. Free persons of color could even own slaves.

Another anomaly, albeit post-Jim Crow, is how and when our libraries changed from a separate but equal policy to total desegregation. Without fanfare, our libraries desegregated almost a decade prior to most of the rest of the deep South. An amazing accomplishment for a small, deeply southern town rooted in antebellum sensibilities and unique, international roots.

This event was made possible by Friends of the New Orleans Public Library and this recording was created live during the event.

To read more about desegregation in the Jim Crow era South, go here.

The historic fight for civil rights in New Orleans is more complicated than most movements in the other 50 United States. Prior to Reconstruction, and the Jim Crow era, free people of color here could legally own property. Free persons of color could even own slaves.

Another anomaly, albeit post-Jim Crow, is how and when our libraries changed from a separate but equal policy to total desegregation. Without fanfare, our libraries desegregated almost a decade prior to most of the rest of the deep South. An amazing accomplishment for a small, deeply southern town rooted in antebellum sensibilities and unique, international roots.

Join us for the story of desegregation in New Orleans libraries ca. 1954.

Mack C. Guillory III, emcee.

This was recorded live at Nora Navra Library on February 13, 2019.

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 Street that is thought to date to the 1930s. At the end of the 1930s, Williams made his way to New Orleans and, shortly after, to an apartment in this building. ~ Source: The Historic New Orleans Collection, Gift of Mrs. Solis Seiferth, acc. no. 1985.120.141