Special Event

PRESENTED BY KILLER THEATER NEW ORLEANS 

Don your 1920s best for this interactive murder mystery event. Come with a group or solo, and we’ll make sure you’re on a team to help solve the murder. See Lolly le Fleur, “The Flower of the South,” fresh from airing her immortal voice to the stunned theatres of Europe. Her performance is certain to bring out all the leading lights of the city. We ask that guests refrain from committing murders during Ms. le Fleur’s performance, as the unique and pleasing tone of her voice, paired with the exotic jazz rhythms, has been known to arouse the ardent passions of the crowd. Witness this marvel as she graces her hometown with another earth-shattering night of excitement and thrills! It promises to be a night to remember. Cash bar available, plus prizes and giveaways!

“The peak of my virtuosity was in the one-act plays. Some of which are like firecrackers in a rope,” Williams wrote to director Elia Kazan in 1950. One-act plays were ever present in Tennessee Williams’s creative life. His first one-act won a prize at the University of Missouri when he was a freshman in 1930. His final one-act (considered to be his last play) is dated January 1983, a month before his death. He never stopped writing one-acts, and there are currently over 75 by Williams in print today. This year our tribute will take a look at short Williams plays from every decade—1930s through 1980s. To his college friends, he referred to his short plays as “fantasies.” Many of them are funny and take place in fairy, sci-fi, or otherwise mythic locations, including The Gnädiges Fräulein, The Case of the Crushed Petunias, The Chalky White Substance, Ten Blocks on The Camino Real and A Recluse and His Guest. Others share the poetry and grit of his most famous dramas, such as 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, Mister Paradise, I Can’t Imagine Tomorrow, and Green Eyes. You’ll hear excerpts from the familiar, as well as some hidden gems. The event is curated by Festival Director Paul J. Willis and Williams editor Thomas Keith (who also hosts).

Readers this year will include Festival luminaries Maureen Corrigan, Michael Cunningham, Jewelle Gomez,  Joan Larkin, Tim Murray, John “Ray” Proctor, and Mink Stole.

The annual Tribute Reading is presented by a grant from the New Orleans Theatre Association (NOTA).

Hors d’oeuvres and a cash bar at 6:30 PM; Performance at 7:30 PM.

The success of the ongoing horror television series based on Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire has created renewed interest in Rice’s bestselling 1976 debut novel. Rice was born in New Orleans in 1941, spent most of her childhood and teenage years here, and returned to the city in her late 40s, leaving again in 2005. Upon her death in 2021 at the age of 80, Rice was returned to her beloved New Orleans and interred in Metairie Cemetery. Led by southern literary scholar Gary Richards, the 2025 breakfast book club will return to this iconographic work within the canon of vampire literature to explore its New Orleans setting and to meditate on its savvy, provocative use of vampirism as an extended metaphor for sexual otherness. Readers are invited to purchase and/or read the standard paperback version (ISBN 978-0345337665).  

“The horror of class stratification, racism, and prejudice is that some people begin to believe that the security of their families and communities depends on the oppression of others, that for some to have good lives there must be others whose lives are truncated and brutal.”—Dorothy Allison, Skin, Firebrand Books, 1994.

Dorothy Allison was a queer icon for decades and also one of our community’s brightest lights and strongest voices. Dorothy stood as a beacon of hope and wisdom, which she shared with the world in her writing. Raised as a bastard out of Carolina, Dorothy fiercely fought against stigma and shame, and fought for the underprivileged. Her work brilliantly explored the connections and intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality. She was also a long time supporter and friend of Saints & Sinners, was in our first Hall of Fame class of Literary Saints, and participated whenever she was able. It’s almost impossible to imagine Saints and Sinners without Dorothy. She was also a favorite TWFest speaker, loved for her honesty, quick humor, and solid advice for aspiring writers. We hope you will join us for this tribute reading for a lesbian literary legend.

Hosted by Jewelle Gomez, with additional readings by Pat Brady, Greg Herren, Thomas Keith, Susan Larson, and Elisabeth Nonas.