Hollins is also featured in two of the “Great List” categories the education services company curates: “Most Politically Active Students” and “Great College Theater.” Each list names 16 to 29 colleges in alphabetical (not ranked) order.

In the guide’s profile of the university, students praise Hollins as “a great place for people who want life experience” that provides “a lot of incredible opportunities for anyone willing to take them.” They also cite internship and study abroad opportunities as “exceptional” and describe faculty as “amazing, talented, dedicated, and compassionate.” The Princeton Review adds, “The alumni network is similarly solid, and many students land jobs and internships through previous graduates.”

“We salute Hollins for its outstanding academics and we are genuinely pleased to recommend it to prospective applicants searching for their ‘best-fit’ college,” said Rob Franek, The Princeton Review’s editor-in-chief and lead author of The Best 387 Colleges.

Only about 14% of America’s 2,700 four-year colleges are profiled in the guide. The Princeton Review chooses the colleges based on data it annually collects from administrators at hundreds of colleges about their institutions’ academic offerings. The company also considers data it gathers from its surveys of students at the colleges who rate and report on various aspects of their campus and community experiences.

Anna Johnson ’21

Johnson received the Kennedy Center Award for Excellence in Sound Design for her work on Hollins Theatre’s production of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which was presented virtually in October 2020. She and other student artists were selected for outstanding achievement in a range of disciplines from eight virtual regional festivals that were held in January and February of this year. Johnson’s sound design for Curious Incident won first-place honors from the KCACTF Region IV, which includes colleges and universities from Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, Puerto Rico, South Carolina, Tennessee, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Virginia.

Kennedy Center first-place awards for excellence in scenic, costume, lighting, and sound design each come with a $1,000 cash prize.

“This has been a remarkable year that forced students to adapt, and in doing so these students found new ways of working that have expanded their toolkits in ways that will make them stronger artists and changemakers in the field,” said KCACTF Artistic Director Gregg Henry.

A theatre major, Johnson graduated from Hollins in May and is pursuing an M.F.A. in sound design at the University of Memphis.

Presented by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., KCACTF encourages and celebrates the finest and most diverse theatrical productions from colleges and universities throughout the United States. Since its establishment 52 years ago, KCACTF has reached millions of theatregoers and made important contributions to the professional development of countless college and university theatre students nationwide.

This is the second consecutive year that 60 Green and Gold student-athletes have earned this designation. Hollins was led by the riding and swim teams, which each placed 12 members.

Eligibility for the ODAC All-Academic Team is open to any student-athlete who competes in a conference-sponsored sport, regardless of academic class. Prospective honorees must achieve at least a 3.25 grade point average for the academic year to be considered for recognition. A total of 2,556 student-athletes from the ODAC’s 17 member institutions made the team this year.

Hollins received both rankings in the National Liberal Arts Colleges category.

To determine the Top Performers on Social Mobility, U.S. News & World Report explains that it looks at “colleges that enrolled and graduated large proportions of economically disadvantaged students who were awarded federal Pell Grants. The vast majority of these federal grants are awarded to students whose adjusted gross family incomes are under $50,000.”

The Best Value Schools ranking “weighs a college’s academic quality alongside the net cost of attendance for a student who received the average level of need-based financial aid,” the guide, now in its 37th edition, reports. “The higher the quality of the program and the lower the cost, the better the deal. Only schools ranked in or near the top half of their categories are included because U.S. News considers the most significant values to be among colleges that are above average academically.”

Hollins is ranked #105 overall in the National Liberal Arts category, and is also cited as an A+ School for B Students.

“To judge the level of quality at each institution on the A-Plus Schools for B Students lists, U.S. News & World Report first examined two variables: the school’s performance in the 2022 edition of the Best Colleges rankings and the average freshman retention rate. Since the U.S. News rankings are a gauge of excellence, schools in National Universities, National Liberal Arts Colleges, Regional Universities, and Regional Colleges all had to first be ranked in the top three-fourths of their 2022 Best Colleges ranking categories to be eligible for the A-Plus Schools for B Students ranking list.” In addition, the guide notes, “colleges had to admit a meaningful proportion of students who didn’t get straight As in high school.”

Cathryn Hankla ’80, M.A. ’82 has been passionate about writing, especially poetry, since she was 12 years old. “Poetry combines many things I love: music, phrasing, concision, image-making, precision, shape making,” she told The Roanoke Times in 2018. “It’s a way of thinking and knowledge that only exists in poetic form; poetry cannot be paraphrased and retain its force and meaning.”

Throughout a nearly 40-year teaching career at Hollins, Hankla has been devoted to her craft and equally focused on helping students understand the process of writing. As she explained in a 2012 interview for Hollins magazine, “Hollins has changed tremendously during that time, but the one constant has been the creative community I was seeking and I’ve tried to make possible for other people. If you’re a writer you’ve got to do your work in solitude, but that doesn’t mean you’re not nurtured by community.”

She continued, “[Writing] happens in stages — generating ideas, drafting, revising, and editing. You also have to grow yourself spiritually, intellectually, and emotionally in order to write your best stuff. That takes time. You have to be the kind of person who can delay gratification. If you’re not, you won’t stay with it.

“I hope I inspire my students to endure and maintain humility about what that means — not mastering something but remaining a student of it for a lifetime.”

Hankla has remained committed to that philosophy throughout a remarkable span of creativity and productivity as well as dedicated support of new writers. After completing her undergraduate and graduate degrees at Hollins, she joined the faculty in 1982; the following year, her first collection of poetry, Phenomena, was published. Eight more volumes of poetry have followed, including Afterimages, Negative History, Texas School Book Depository and Great Bear (both finalists for the Library of Virginia Poetry Prize), Emerald City Blues, Poems for the Pardoned, Last Exposures, and Galaxies. Her works in other genres include fiction (Learning the Mother Tongue, A Blue Moon in Poorwater, The Land Between, and Fortune Teller Miracle Fish) and nonfiction (Lost Places: On Losing and Finding Home).

Carly Lewis ’21 remembered feeling both excitement and trepidation when she enrolled in her first advanced creative writing workshop, which was led by Hankla. “I was scared to read something from one of our random writing exercises during class because I thought it wasn’t going to be good. She told me, ‘No first draft is good. Just read it and you can fix it later. It’s not meant to be good at first.’ That’s always stuck with me. Even if you think it’s good, there’s always work to do. She’s always encouraged me to have confidence and trust my writing.”

For Gabriel Reed M.F.A. ’21, working with Hankla during his second year in the creative writing M.F.A. program at Hollins was when he began “shifting my thinking about my poetry. I narrowed in on what I was attempting to write, and Cathy was perfect for me in helping me find that voice.”

Based on Hankla’s recommendation, Reed’s debut poetry collection, Springbook, was accepted for publication by Groundhog Poetry Press.

The Richlands, Virginia, native twice served as department chair; under her leadership in 2018, Hollins’ Jackson Center for Creative Writing introduced an undergraduate major in creative writing to complement its concentration and minor in creative writing and its Master of Fine Arts in the field. Directing the Jackson Center from 2008 to 2012, Hankla spearheaded partnerships with the Roanoke Regional Writers Conference and Studio Roanoke, and helped expand scholarship support for graduate students. In 2012, she began a two-year term as the Susan Gager Jackson Professor of Creative Writing. She is poetry editor for The Hollins Critic.

Hankla’s commitment to both writing and teaching has earned admirers both on campus and beyond. “Her productivity has been truly astonishing [and] her work ethic sets the bar for all of us,” a colleague stated in 2018. In a 2003 book review for The Roanoke Times, Barbara Dickinson noted, “…her prodigious stream of poetry and fiction has been consistent in one respect: excellence. The unexpected aspect of her work is its far-reaching range of subject matter, which she brings to ground with accuracy and grace.”

Beth Burgin Waller ’04 expressed those sentiments succinctly but no less powerfully in a 2006 Roanoke Times interview: “She’s a great person, writer, and mentor. People like her inspire me.”

Kathleen Nolan shaped the art history program into a multi-faceted program and taught majors, minors, and nonmajors the skills to perceptively and thoughtfully interpret images from the past and present alike. She focused on medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque art history during her 35-year career at Hollins, and her scholarly interests include the history of women in the Middle Ages and the works of art commissioned by women to tell their stories. She co-edited Arts of the Medieval Cathedrals: Studies on Architecture, Stained Glass and Sculpture in Honor of Anne Prache. Her book Queens in Stone and Silver: The Creation of a Visual Identity of Queenship in Capetian France (Palgrave 2009) looks at queens’ personal seals and effigy tombs. Her articles and essays have appeared in The Art Bulletin, the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Studies in Iconography, and Gesta.

Hands-on research was a hallmark of Nolan’s teaching. Thanks to a loan of decorative objects from the Huntington Museum of Art in West Virginia to Hollins’ Eleanor D. Wilson Museum, Nolan’s 2017 Islamic Art class engaged with rare artifacts from the Near East, including rugs, pouring vessels, a traveling scribe set, a dish, a manuscript page firman, and bath sandals that date as far back as the 11th and 12th centuries and originated in Iran, Syria, and Turkey.

“The students and I were thrilled to have these,” Nolan said at the time. “There was great excitement in the vault of the Wilson Museum when we got to experience these objects firsthand.”

The following year, students in Nolan’s Gothic Art seminar conducted original research on a handmade French volume of prayer from the late 15th century called a book of hours that came to Hollins in the 1940s as part of an extensive collection of manuscripts donated by industrialist Samuel Herbert McVitty in memory of his wife Lucy Winton McVitty, who served as a member of the Hollins Board of Trustees. Produced throughout the medieval period, the books contained devotional text and also “some of the greatest paintings and drawings of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance,” according to Wendy A. Stein of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Nolan’s class centered on the book’s images, or “miniatures,” and created detailed catalogue entries for Wyndham Robertson Library’s Digital Exhibits website. “I wanted the students in this particular seminar to develop a visible record of their research and enhance the online presence of this gorgeous manuscript,” she explained.

For students in the Gothic Art seminar, examining the book of hours left an enduring impression. “I never thought I’d have the opportunity to come into such a close encounter with a manuscript like this that isn’t behind glass in a museum,” said art history major Clara Souvignier ’20. “It’s a prize that we have something this old and this worthwhile. The trust that Professor Nolan and the library placed in us means a lot.”

Another memorable experience for a number of students was Nolan’s January Short Term course, “Julie and Julia and Me: French Cooking and Food Culture for Everyone,” where they immersed themselves in books and videos about French culture and also got to gather at Nolan’s home to try their hand at preparing French cuisine.

“Years later, equations and theories may have no applications in daily life,” a Roanoke Times columnist wrote in a January 2012 article about the course. “But I’ll bet some of Kathleen Nolan’s students at Hollins University this term will never forget how to make French onion soup, flip an omelet, or truss a chicken.”

Among the honors Nolan received during her academic career at Hollins was the 2002 Herta Freitag Faculty Legacy Award, which recognizes a full-time teaching faculty member who has received external recognition of professional excellence in the form of publications and papers, exhibits and performances, prizes, and other related expressions of their work.

Nolan once called teaching at Hollins “one of the best jobs in America.” It’s easy to see why she found it so gratifying.

Donna Polseno and Richard “Rick” Hensley played a crucial role in expanding the breadth and scope of the art department at Hollins to provide creative opportunities for students and strengthen the university’s outreach to artists of all skill levels throughout the country.

Before coming to Hollins in the early 2000s, the married artists were already internationally renowned for their work — Polseno for her hand-built vessels and figurative sculpture, and Hensley for his porcelain pottery. After graduating from the Kansas City Art Institute and then earning their graduate degrees at the Rhode Island School of Design, they settled in Floyd, Virginia, and started their own pottery studio. Separately and together, they were subsequently featured in many prestigious exhibitions; notably, both were in the “Young Americans” juried exhibition at the American Craft Museum early in their careers. In addition, their work has been widely published in ceramic books and magazines.

“I strive to make pottery that carries with it a sense of energy and life that can only be enhanced when used for the presentation of food and flowers,” Polseno once noted in an artist statement. Of her sculpture, she said, “My work has been centered for years around the metaphor of women as the spiritual containers of life. My interest is in portraying the essence of a woman; her capacity symbolically and in the flesh, to give life, to nurture, and exhibit vulnerability, beauty, and strength.”

Polseno and Hensley also taught classes and sessions and served as visiting artists in programs across the United States and around the world. The venues ranged from Alfred University and the Rochester Institute of Technology to the La Meridiana International School of Ceramics in Certaldo, Italy, Turkey’s International Ceramics Symposium, and the Jingdezhen Ceramics Institute in China.

When Polseno and Hensley started team teaching at Hollins in 2004, they created the first in-depth ceramics program for the university, concurrent with the opening of the Richard Wetherill Visual Arts Center and the Eleanor D. Wilson Museum.

In its catalogue for the exhibition Duo: Donna Polseno & Richard Hensley, which was on display this fall, the Wilson Museum stated, “Over the years, Polseno and Hensley’s ceramics program and the Eleanor D. Wilson Museum have grown up like siblings in the Visual Arts Center.” During the past 17 years, their work has been featured in several museum exhibitions, including Donna Polseno: A Mid-Career Survey (2006), which showcased Polseno’s sculptural work. “The two have dedicated their lives to creating, promoting, and experimenting with the possibilities of clay, and fostering generations of new artists in the field,” the museum noted.

Polseno developed and founded the Women Working With Clay Symposium in 2011 to honor the accomplishments of women ceramic artists and create an environment that promotes ideas, images, artwork, and discussions. The symposium celebrated its 10th anniversary this summer with a virtual program featuring over 40 ceramic artists focusing on topics such as mentorship, social justice, and apprenticeships.

Visiting Lecturer of Art Josh Manning paid tribute to the pair in an essay that describes Polseno and Hensley as “architects. Over the years, they have been known as potters, sculptors, ceramists, professors, or artists… as all of which Donna and Rick have rightly been addressed, and yet somehow they are all of these things at once. I settled on this word, architect, not because they are practitioners of architecture but because they physically and conceptually helped to build the scaffolding that I and many of my peers find ourselves standing upon.”

Manning concluded, “Rick and Donna are knowing participants within the continuum of humanity that is ceramic art and they are helping to carry this conversation forward.”

Polseno and Hensley are founding members of the nationally known 16 Hands Studio Tour, which since 1998 has highlighted the artistry of craftsmen in the Floyd area every May and November. They continue to work in their studio, teach workshops, and exhibit their work, and spend part of each year at their small house in Liguria, Italy.

Ever since he was a student in the fourth grade, Ernie Zulia has steadfastly believed that “not only can theatre be key to a strong community, but it can change the world.”

Zulia brought that philosophy to Hollins in 2005 and it profoundly affected the world on campus. Under his leadership as associate professor and artistic director, Hollins Theatre became a dynamic and creative force on the stage. The theatre department brought national acclaim to Hollins, earning multiple Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival awards and a place on The Princeton Review’s list of the top college theatre programs in the country. In 2019, OnStage Blog named Hollins Theatre as the top undergraduate theatre program in Virginia.

Before coming to Hollins, Zulia had already directed more than 100 productions of plays, musicals, operas, and world premieres in theatres around the United States and abroad. He was perhaps best known for his stage adaptation of All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, based on the series of bestselling books by Robert Fulghum. The production premiered at Roanoke’s Mill Mountain Theatre (MMT) in 1992 and went on to receive thousands of productions around the world.

At Hollins, Zulia built upon that distinguished reputation, challenging and entertaining audiences with a mix of dramas, musicals, comedies, children’s theatre, and new work by Hollins playwrights.

In 2011, Hollins Theatre launched the Legacy Series, showcasing plays, musicals, and original theatre pieces based on works by Hollins’ most recognized writers and rising stars. Beginning with the classic children’s book Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown ’32, the Legacy Series has included A Woman of Independent Means (Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey ’60), Bellocq’s Ophelia (Natasha Trethewey M.A. ’91), Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Annie Dillard ’67, M.A. ’68), Good Ol’ Girls (Lee Smith ’67 and Jill McCorkle M.A. ’81), and Decision Height (Meredith Dayna Levy ’12, M.F.A. ’18).

Zulia estimated that about 4,000 schoolchildren, families, “and people of all conceivable demographics” saw Goodnight Moon during its 2011 run (the production enjoyed a revival in 2015), while Bellocq’s Ophelia, which Zulia adapted for the stage with Associate Professor of English T.J. Anderson III and Lexie Martin Mondot ’12, was invited to be presented at the Kennedy Center’s 11th annual Page to Stage Festival of New Play Readings after its February 2012 premiere at Hollins.

On Labor Day weekend in 2016, Zulia and Hollins joined forces with the City of Roanoke, MMT, and Roanoke Public Libraries to organize the first-ever Starcropolis, an evening of live theatre beneath the Roanoke Star on Roanoke’s Mill Mountain. The event featured a series of short plays created specifically for the festival, including works written by playwrights from the Playwright’s Lab at Hollins University.

“In this fast-paced world where we are all trapped in front of one kind of electronic screen or other, the live theatre event is more valuable than ever,” Zulia said of Starcropolis. “It brings us together in one place at the same time to share a laugh, shed a tear, and experience the power of great stories.”

With Zulia’s creation of the Hollins Theatre Institute, the department’s undergraduate and graduate programs came together under one umbrella to foster unique opportunities for innovative theatre artists. One of the artists Zulia brought to Hollins was Todd Ristau, founder of the Playwright’s Lab. A $3 million gift from the James S. McDonnell Family Foundation to Hollins Theatre in 2009 gave Zulia the opportunity to transform and update the theatre space.

In an April 2021 interview with The Roanoke Times, Zulia said, “I’ve had a fantastic run at Hollins. In many ways, it was a marriage made in heaven.” He emphasized that even though he has retired, he intends to stay actively involved with directing, writing, and especially college theatre.

“Hollins and Wendy-Marie [Martin M.F.A. ’14, Certificate in Directing New Work ’17, Zulia’s successor as chair of the theatre department] have invited me to return as a visiting artist and consultant, and I plan to take them up on the offer.”

Peter Coogan

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF HISTORY EMERITUS

For much of his career at Hollins, Peter Coogan was one of the most sought-after faculty members for speaking engagements at schools, civic groups, and other organizations in Southwest Virginia. And with good reason: Coogan drew upon his expertise in presidential leadership and other facets of modern American and world history to present entertaining and thought-provoking lectures such as “Myths of the Second World War,” “The War in Vietnam,” and “Presidential Character and Leadership in the 20th Century.” “…historians like Coogan look beyond legend,” the Danville Register & Bee reported following his presentation on the “Presidential Character” topic to students at Chatham Hall in 1996.

Community audiences were getting a taste of what undergraduate and graduate students had enjoyed since Coogan joined the Hollins faculty in 1988: incisive explorations of topics ranging from the Cold War and America’s rise to power to foreign relations and national security policy designed to enlighten, prompt debate, and probe conventional wisdom.

“Studying under Peter Coogan and [Associate Professor of History] Rachel Nuñez in the history department inspired a curiosity to learn about and question the world around me and the world that existed before me,” said Meika Downey ’17, who went on from Hollins to pursue a Master of Arts in history at Virginia Commonwealth University. “Academically, professionally, and personally, my time at Hollins was a transformative experience and informed who I am now. Perhaps the most important and transferable skills with which I emerged were the abilities to think critically and communicate orally and in writing. The academic rigor with which Professors Coogan and Nuñez taught their classes also invariably prepared me for graduate school.”

When asked in what ways her Hollins experience had influenced her since she graduated, Megan Stolz Rogers ’09 stated that among other benefits, “I learned in one of Professor Coogan’s classes that it’s important to bring something of value to the conversation, rather than talking simply for the sake of talking.”

One of Coogan’s lasting contributions to Hollins began in 2006, when he and other academic division representatives were tasked with identifying an aspect of student learning and not only developing a plan to improve it, but also to launch an initiative that would actually be transformative for Hollins students.

“The first thing that struck us was that all our so-called ‘signature’ programs, such as internships and study abroad, were closed to first-year students—there was nothing specific for them to help them get going,” Coogan recalled in a 2013 interview for Hollins magazine. “We also figured out our first-year students were coming out of high school needing help with writing and thinking. What made sense to us was a program that focused on the first-year experience.”

Coogan and his colleagues developed the idea for the university’s first-year seminar program (FYS), and it proved to be an outright success: Hollins’ scores in a number of National Survey of Student Engagement categories improved dramatically. As noted in the Quality Enhancement Plan that Hollins completed for the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, “These seminars [emphasize] not just the traditional skills of research, writing, and verbal communication, they also [seek] to improve students’ passion for learning, their ability to learn collaboratively and to make connections between ideas across disciplines, and their abilities to solve problems actively and creatively.”

At its inception, Coogan served as codirector of FYS and even taught one of the seminars, History Rocks. Among his students over the years was Aditi Sharma ’21, who came to Hollins from Nepal. Adjusting to the new environment, speaking English all the time, and missing her family were at times stressful, and she credits Coogan and the seminar with boosting her confidence.

“Professor Coogan and that class encouraged me to speak out. I’m very vocal now about a lot of things. My high school friends wouldn’t recognize me. I was so timid then and in the shadows. In [Professor] Coogan’s class you were obliged to talk, and once that started happening, my confidence grew. History Rocks really helped me, and I can’t thank him enough.”

Left to right, Jasmine Carter ’19, Tori Carter ’21, Saffron Dantzler ’21, Nya Monroe-Stephens ’20

A partnership led by five Virginia higher education institutions, including Hollins University, has been honored with the GoAbroad Innovation in Diversity Award for 2021.

The award recognizes strategic efforts to expand international educational opportunities to traditionally underrepresented groups.

Hollins, Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), Randolph-Macon College, Bridgewater College, and Shenandoah University were chosen as this year’s award winners for their initiative Black + Abroad. This virtual series, held during the 2020-21 academic year, curated a space for Black students to share their thoughts, questions, and reservations about travel (and study abroad) by engaging in conversation and storytelling with experienced travelers and study abroad alumni of color and education abroad advisors. The series was organized by the education abroad staffs from each of the five schools taking part in the collaboration.

“The mission is to close the gap between being Black and going abroad. Black students hear from their peers, engage in candid conversations, and learn about how to overcome challenges to studying abroad, whether those are financial, practical, or racial,” said Jasmine Carter ’19, who along with fellow Hollins alumnae Nya Monroe-Stephens ’20, Tori Carter ’21, and Saffron Dantzler ’21 participated in Black + Abroad. All volunteered to share their experiences as Black travelers, overseas residents, and study abroad participants.

Black + Abroad was first launched at VCU as an annual event created by study abroad alumni students of color. It subsequently evolved into this year’s virtual series, which featured six free sessions and welcomed 724 international educational professionals and 258 students. Recordings of the sessions, as well as additional resources for support and guidance, are now available on the Black + Abroad website as a tangible resource for students of color.

“Studying abroad can be a scary prospect for many students, even for those who know they want to travel,” explained Carter. “Black students have their own unique concerns and challenges, which can often be overlooked or misunderstood by advisors, peers, and programs.”

Carter added that by fostering discussions around “Blackness” and “Black perceptions” abroad, Black + Abroad is ensuring students “feel inspired and gain insight from experienced travelers who had to take the leap to travel for the first time at some point. At the same time, advisors will see the perspectives of Black students in order to better understand their needs and serve them in a more effective and equitable way.”