Gulf Coast Life

In 1989, a nonprofit was founded to help people learning English as a second language thrive here in Southwest Florida. It’s called Literacy Council Gulf Coast and it helps both adults and children strengthen their English skills. Last month, it won the Non-Profit or Charity Organization of the Year award in the Bonita Springs Community’s Choice Awards, so we sat down with their Executive Director and Operations Manager to learn about the Council's local impact.

Players Circle Theater opens its 8th season with a production of the Broadway farce “The Nerd.” Through comic chaos, physical comedy, and escalating absurdity, the play poses the surprisingly relatable question “What do you owe someone who once did you a great favor, especially when that person makes your life miserable?”We’ll explore the play in a conversation with director Bob Cacioppo and actor Ted Wioncek.

Hope Eternal Gardens in Punta Gorda became Southwest Florida's first natural burial cemetery when it opened in 2024. Now, it's also Charlotte County's first accredited Level One Arboretum. That means they've met specific professional standards for curating, maintaining, and labeling the trees and woody plants on site for public benefit, research, and education. We learn about the cemetery, what it means to be an arboretum, and how the Museum of Trees works and where it fits into the story of gaining Level I Arboretum accreditation.

An exhibit featuring large format prints of Mac Stone's photographs goes up next week along the boardwalk at Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary. It's one of the remaining old-growth swamps the award-winning conservation photographer and a National Geographic Explorer featured in his new book is "Cypress: The Last Old-Growth Swamps." We revisit our conversation with him about the new book recorded in August.

Nick Penniman passed away on Sept. 29 at the age of 88. Mr. Penniman began his career as a journalist, first at the Illinois State Journal-Register before joining the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1975, where he rose to be publisher for 14 years. Here in Southwest Florida, Penniman was chair emeritus of the Conservancy of Southwest Florida and a trustee of the Everglades Foundation. He was also chair emeritus of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, and a Florida Master Naturalist, and he served on 33 nonprofit boards over the course of his life, including the Florida Center for Government Accountability. He was also a lifelong advocated for freedom of the press and the crucial role trustworthy news was to maintaining a healthy democracy. We revisit a conversation we had with him in 2021 when he released his book, “On the Knife: A History of Sugar in Florida.”

The Florida Philharmonic kicks off its third season with a concert celebrating the mystery, magic and macabre of Halloween with a program titled “Masquerade: Symphony of Shadows.”The concert features well-known works by composers from the Romantic Era along with more contemporary pieces by Emmy award-winning composer Anthony DiLorenzo. We’ll get a preview in a conversation with Maestro Richard Stoelzel and Concertmaster Ming Gao.

Neurologist Ray Dorsey is a leading advocate and educator on Parkinson’s disease. He offers explanations for causes and descrobes treatments.

News, as our guest today’s website says, has a scaling problem. It’s just not feasible for teams of humans to track news bias and partisan presentation for everything coming down the pipe, and that’s where PressAudit.org aims to come in. It’s a website, app, and browser extension that uses the power of big data aggregation tools to distill the daily news landscape into a clear dashboard of who is covering what and how; what the most attention-gathering stories of the day are; and what’s being under-reported or where news blind spots might be. We talk with its creator to find out how it works.

Players Circle Theater kicks off it’s 2026-2027 performance season this month with the Broadway farce “The Nerd.” The season also includes a holiday show, a comedy, a romantic comedy, a one-man historical drama, a musical by Steve Martin and Edie Brickell and the regional premiere of the sci-fi drama “Marjorie Prime.” We’ll explore the season ahead in a conversation with Bob Cacioppo and Ted Wincek.

Jenny Bartoy is editor of an anthology called No Contact: Writers on Estrangement. It's a collection of essays and poetry from writers who have distanced themselves from family members, or been on the receiving end of “no contact.”