LETTERS READ

This segment in our tenth anniversary season, is about Armen Merjian, a stellar example of the 2026 Letters Read theme, “What Activates Activists?” Merjian is amongst this country’s leading civil rights attorneys and perhaps the most important legal activist in the history of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Armen Merjian has been fighting the good fight against civil rights discrimination largely his entir...

Dave Walker, veteran journalist and creator/producer of The Museum Goer , interviews Letters Read director Nancy Sharon Collins about ten years of this project's programming. Yet another example of 2026's "outtake-sub-theme, what activates activists?” This podcast begins with an outtake from the 2024 Armen Merjian interview., a multi-decade civil rights and public interest attorney. A...

This mini-podcast introduces the 2026 and 10th anniversary season. Listen to this research outtake about how one Louisiana woman decided to take action about the first direct hit to overturn Roe v Wade and destroy abortion rights in the United States. Letters Read director first interviewed Allyn Goff in 2025 for the Terri Bartlett reading. Goff became close to Bartlett as they both worked tireles...

Remembering the Legacy of Terri Bartlett. In 1984, Terri Bartlett moved to New Orleans to found Planned Parenthood Louisiana. For more than a decade thereafter, Bartlett fought tirelessly for reproductive rights and human dignity in this state. This performance endeavors to serve as an inspiring model for grassroots and political activism, justice, and equal rights for all. Watch a video of the li...

Welcome to the first, full, 2025 Letters Read episode. This program was recorded in two locations. The overlying structure in a studio. The other in a noisy restaurant near Lake Pontchartrain, New Orleans, during lunch. You will be able to hear the difference. Thanks to Steve Czyck who engineered it all together. In this podcast, we meet Angela Breckenridge, PhD educator and Mr. Tedd Walley, carto...

This mini-podcast continues the 2025 season about sex. Today’s reading is about love letters. Inspired by documentation of love, two letters in particular. Moreover this segment focuses on how love works. Like when two people fall for each other. What’s the motivation? Is it simply physical attraction, raw sex appeal? Or is feeling love something more? Listen and learn.

Hello! Welcome to Letters Read. The ongoing series in which letters and written documents about culturally vital individuals from various times and Louisiana communities are interpreted into spoken word performances. These are free, open to the general public, live sometimes, and other podcasts. This is the ninth consecutive season. This season is about sex. The physical activity we engage in for...

This podcast wraps up the 2024 incubator-style programming on the early days of HIV | AIDS. This series is brought to you in support of the LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana . Most productions in this series are short, mini-podcasts, five to seven minutes long. This podcast takes longer to wrap up a difficult and emotional topic. It comprises Sims's experience in Los Angeles, ca. 1990s, as direc...

This podcast, and one or two more before year’s end, wrap-up the 2024 incubator-style mini-series on the early days of HIV | AIDS. Brought to you in support of the LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana. The recording is about Pierre Rene “Peter”, as he was known, DeLancey. A sad story with a bittersweet ending. He was queer. At a time when being gay or homosexual or light in one’s loafers was not ok...

October 29 at 7:00 pm CDT Newcomb Institute Diboll Gallery, room 300 3rd floor of the Commons 43 Newcomb Place Tulane University campus. A second reading from the archives of Josephine Louise Newcomb. This one performed, live, at Newcomb Institute. Emcee and Readers: Nick Slie, Lisa Shattuck, Shadow Angelina Starkey, and Robert Valley H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College was established by Josephine...

From 1981 to 1998, K. (Kenneth) Brad Ott wrote, edited, and published the grassroots Dialogue Newsjournal reporting community activism and activities in New Orleans. This third mini podcast in the four-part LETTERS READ series is produced in support of LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana and New Orleans AIDS MemoryProject. Antenna is LETTERS READ fiscal sponsor. This podcast is about activism. Ind...

Segment 3 in the mini-series about the early days of the New Orleans HIV|AIDS epidemic. Comprising two recorded clips from an interview with Noel Twilbeck. In the first, Twillbeck explains the origins of NO/AIDS Task Force. Describing the beginning of the HIV|AIDS epidemic. Early 1980s. The second clip refers to a letter. “The Letter”. Notice of the award from HRSA documenting their new status as...

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. A loyal and very active member. I thank him for...

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 preserving history and for helping in this productio...

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 release is the documentary film, George Dureau: New Orl...

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 her daughter Sophie who died at the age of 15. At...

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, significant municipal water issues collided in bo...

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 itself into a beautiful, tie-dye butterfly. In whi...

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 Claiborne Expressway. That, horrendously, did.  Th...

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 a leader through the lens of workplace equity and...

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 of New Orleans streets.  Describing these as...

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 precise! Her earliest influence was her mot...

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, and the wild. Varisco writes further about the pro...

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 Court on three conspiracy charges. A little over...