![\"Jeri](\"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/rogers-trethewey-spencer_263x643.jpg\")
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\n\n\tM<\/span>ore than 150 Hollins students and graduates have had their work published in the internationally recognized literary journal Artemis<\/em> since its beginning in 1977. The Hollins contributors to the 2024 journal marked a true \u201cfull circle\u201d moment for Artemis<\/em> editor-in-chief and founder Jeri Rogers M.A.L.S. \u201991.<\/p>\n Rogers is a big believer in life\u2019s connections, and September 5, 2024, was such a night for Artemis<\/em>, a literary journal for artists and writers from the Blue Ridge Mountains and beyond. Artemis supporters, Hollins community members including dozens of student writers, and people from across Southwest Virginia packed the Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke to hear remarks by Pulitzer Prize-winning U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey M.A. \u201991 to launch Artemis<\/em>\u2019s 31st volume.<\/p>\n Trethewey, who serves on the Hollins Board of Trustees, was the nation\u2019s poet laureate from 2012 to 2014, winning, among other prestigious awards, the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for Native Guard<\/em>, a collection of poems about Black Union soldiers in the Civil War. The director of Northwestern University\u2019s creative writing program, she is also the daughter of the late Eric \u201cRick\u201d Trethewey, poet and professor of English, who taught at Hollins for nearly 30 years.<\/p>\n Her poem \u201cEnlightenment\u201d is published in the 2024 Artemis<\/em>. It centers on a trip she and her father took to Monticello and her own history with race\u2014her father was white and her mother was Black at a time when mixed- race marriage was illegal in the South. Also published in the journal is Rick Trethewey\u2019s lyrical poem \u201cFrost on the Fields.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a pleasure and honor to be invited by Jeri to celebrate the Artemis<\/em> launch,\u201d Trethewey reflects. \u201cReturning to Roanoke, to Hollins, always feels like returning home. This is the place where I first began to become a writer, and I feel a sense of joy whenever I approach the campus. It carries memories of my father, the hikes we took, our favorite restaurants. This visit and this reading felt particularly special because my brother Silas and his mom were there, and I was able to read poems of my father\u2019s that were about both of us.\u201d<\/p>\n Both poems by the talented Trethewey poets connect with the 2024 Artemis<\/em> theme, \u201cIlluminating the Darkness,\u201d which Rogers chose to address challenges facing artists and writers today. It wasn\u2019t until the sold-out launch that Rogers realized another connection as Trethewey spoke that evening about growing up and her mother\u2019s murder by her former stepfather, described in Trethewey\u2019s powerful, poignant Memorial Drive: A Daughter\u2019s Memoir<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen Natasha speaks, the depth of her soul is coming through, and the strength of her writing is so profound,\u201d Rogers adds. \u201cIn my remarks that night, I said that she turns misery into beauty, which was my original motivation for Artemis<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n Trethewey, who has been featured in several issues, had not been aware of Artemis<\/em>\u2019s original mission, says Rogers. In 1975, Rogers, a photographer, became the inaugural director of the Women\u2019s Resource Center in Roanoke, which supports victims of domestic abuse. Rogers began a writing workshop to help them process the trauma and recruited Hollins writers and faculty to teach. In 1977, Hollins faculty helped Rogers publish the writing and art from the workshops, a feat that became the first Artemis<\/em>.<\/p>\n Rogers underscored the founding vision of transforming agony into art with the journal\u2019s name for the moon goddess who often has a torch, the perfect archetype to represent a woman with strength. Another full-circle moment: Rick Trethewey often volunteered in prisons, teaching poetry to inmates.<\/p>\n Since Artemis<\/em>\u2019s humble, humanity-focused origins, 150+ Hollins writers and artists, students, faculty, and alumnae\/i have been featured contributors and cover artists. Numerous Hollins faculty have served on its board, including Rick Trethewey and the late Richard H.W. Dillard, who together ensured that every Artemis<\/em> issue is archived in the Special Collections at Hollins\u2019 Wyndham Robertson Library.<\/p>\n \u201cFor decades, Artemis<\/em> has been outstanding in its support of Hollins writers and visual artists, and of writers and artists in and around the Roanoke Valley and Southwest Virginia,\u201d says Thorpe Moeckel, associate professor of English and director of the Jackson Center for Creative Writing. His work, too, has been featured within the pages. \u201cIt is rare to see a new issue of Artemis<\/em> without Hollins writers and\/or visual artists in it,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n Poet Elani Spencer \u201927, the first Roanoke Youth Poet Laureate and Artemis<\/em>\u2019s newest Hollins intern, was also on hand last September. Her poem \u201cWash Day, Rebirth\u201d appears in the 2024 Artemis<\/em>, her first for the publication but hardly her last, she hopes. For the launch, Artemis<\/em> invited 50 students from area colleges and universities to Trethewey\u2019s remarks prior to the evening\u2019s main event and book signing. Trethewey\u2019s remarks to students were shared via Zoom to the nation\u2019s Historic Black Colleges and Universities.<\/p>\n A year ago, when Spencer became the Roanoke Youth Poet Laureate, part of the National Poet Laureate program, the late poet Nikki Giovanni, who served on the Artemis<\/em> board as Distinguished Poet, encouraged Rogers to invite Spencer to intern. Her internship began last month and will run through the spring semester, giving Spencer hands-on experience assisting the editorial team, reading submissions, and helping to craft the 2025 journal.<\/p>\n Trethewey\u2019s remarks continue to resonate with Spencer. \u201cShe talked about her relationship with her father and what it was like growing up as a Black woman in the United States,\u201d recalls Spencer, who has been reading Trethewey\u2019s work since high school. \u201cHer style of poetry is very similar to mine in that it gets straight to the point. I also like how she focuses her poetry on making some kind of change. She\u2019s also very humorous, which made the students feel connected to her.\u201d<\/p>\n While a young poet in Rochester, N.Y., Spencer discovered Hollins through its Nancy Thorpe Poetry Contest for female writers in their sophomore or junior year of high school, now in its 61st year. For Spencer, meeting writers of Trethewey\u2019s stature and talent through Hollins and during Spencer\u2019s poet laureate tenure, which ended this past December, made an impact. Spencer represented Roanoke and read her poetry at a range of local and state events and attended virtual creative writing workshops with other national youth poet laureates.<\/p>\n Like Trethewey has for her, Spencer hopes her poetry will encourage others to create art: \u201cBeing poet laureate has made me more confident in my skills and encouraged me to widen the lens of my poetry to talking more about issues within my community and our country and world.\u201d<\/p>\n As she tackles bigger issues in her art, Spencer is thinking big about life post-Hollins. She plans to travel to expand her writing and horizons with different cultural experiences, then work at a big publishing house. Her dream is to create her own artist residency to support artists of all ages and genres to work on their craft.<\/p>\n Spencer hatched another dream last September as she listened to one of her literary idols talk about art\u2019s profound impact on tragedy and community. Someday, Spencer might speak at an Artemis<\/em> launch, tracing her own legacy on the circle of Hollins talent that has helped to shape the journal created to inspire infinite futures.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Sarah Achenbach \u201988 ore than 150 Hollins students and graduates have had their work published in the internationally recognized literary journal Artemis since its beginning in 1977. The Hollins contributors to the 2024 journal marked a true \u201cfull circle\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13021,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[142],"class_list":["post-12905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","tag-winter-2025"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12905","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12905"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12905\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13185,"href":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12905\/revisions\/13185"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.糖心传媒.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}