Peggy Scott Laborde is an Emmy Award-winning producer and the host/producer of Steppin’ Out, New Orleans’ only weekly arts and entertainment discussion program, now in its 38th season on WYES-TV. She served as the president of the Tennessee Williams and New Orleans Literary Festival for a total of 14 years and continues to serve on the Festival's  board. She is also the co-author of four books and has produced over 30 documentaries focusing on the food, culture, and history of New Orleans.

Schedule

2:15 pm to 3:15 pm

State Capitol, House Committee Room 6

Literary New Orleans: A Documentary

with Peggy Scott Laborde, Dominic Massa, and Maurice Carlos Ruffin

Literary New Orleans

The city of New Orleans has served as a setting for many of the world’s most famous literary works, including A Streetcar Named Desire, Interview with the Vampire, and A Confederacy of Dunces. This program, produced and narrated by Peggy Scott Laborde, takes an up-close look at the locally written word over a more than three-century history.

Included are archival interviews with Anne Rice, Tennessee Williams and Thelma Toole, the mother of John Kennedy Toole. Among the authors and literary experts interviewed are Susan Larson, Douglas Brinkley, Mona Lisa Saloy, Nancy Dixon, Edwin Blair, Kalamu ya Salaam, Dr. Kenneth Holditch, Walter Isaacson, T. R. Johnson, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, and Rien Fertel.

A special segment highlights Les Cenelles, written in New Orleans in 1845 and considered the first anthology published by African-American writers. Also featured during the documentary are 19th century authors Kate Chopin, Lafcadio Hearn, and George Washington Cable as well as the vibrant 1920s literary circle based in the French Quarter that included Sherwood Anderson and William Faulkner.

There is also an homage to the avant-garde local publication, The Outsider which included the early works of such Beat Generation poets as Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, and Charles Bukowski.

Produced and narrated by Peggy Scott Laborde, the program is edited by Lenny Delbert Sr., with additional editing by Michael Kailer. Videography by Jonathan Evans, George Matulik, and Steven Patriquin. Originally aired in 2023.