Turning Misery into Beauty
By Sarah Achenbach ’88
More 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 “full circle” moment for Artemis editor-in-chief and founder Jeri Rogers M.A.L.S. ’91.
Rogers is a big believer in life’s connections, and September 5, 2024, was such a night for Artemis, 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. ’91 to launch Artemis’s 31st volume.
Trethewey, who serves on the Hollins Board of Trustees, was the nation’s poet laureate from 2012 to 2014, winning, among other prestigious awards, the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for Native Guard, a collection of poems about Black Union soldiers in the Civil War. The director of Northwestern University’s creative writing program, she is also the daughter of the late Eric “Rick” Trethewey, poet and professor of English, who taught at Hollins for nearly 30 years.
Her poem “Enlightenment” is published in the 2024 Artemis. It centers on a trip she and her father took to Monticello and her own history with race—her 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’s lyrical poem “Frost on the Fields.”
“It was a pleasure and honor to be invited by Jeri to celebrate the Artemis launch,” Trethewey reflects. “Returning 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’s that were about both of us.”
Both poems by the talented Trethewey poets connect with the 2024 Artemis theme, “Illuminating the Darkness,” which Rogers chose to address challenges facing artists and writers today. It wasn’t until the sold-out launch that Rogers realized another connection as Trethewey spoke that evening about growing up and her mother’s murder by her former stepfather, described in Trethewey’s powerful, poignant Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir.
“When Natasha speaks, the depth of her soul is coming through, and the strength of her writing is so profound,” Rogers adds. “In my remarks that night, I said that she turns misery into beauty, which was my original motivation for Artemis.”
Trethewey, who has been featured in several issues, had not been aware of Artemis’s original mission, says Rogers. In 1975, Rogers, a photographer, became the inaugural director of the Women’s 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.
Rogers underscored the founding vision of transforming agony into art with the journal’s 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.
Since Artemis’s 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 issue is archived in the Special Collections at Hollins’ Wyndham Robertson Library.
“For decades, Artemis 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,” 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. “It is rare to see a new issue of Artemis without Hollins writers and/or visual artists in it,” he adds.
Poet Elani Spencer ’27, the first Roanoke Youth Poet Laureate and Artemis’s newest Hollins intern, was also on hand last September. Her poem “Wash Day, Rebirth” appears in the 2024 Artemis, her first for the publication but hardly her last, she hopes. For the launch, Artemis invited 50 students from area colleges and universities to Trethewey’s remarks prior to the evening’s main event and book signing. Trethewey’s remarks to students were shared via Zoom to the nation’s Historic Black Colleges and Universities.
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 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.
Trethewey’s remarks continue to resonate with Spencer. “She talked about her relationship with her father and what it was like growing up as a Black woman in the United States,” recalls Spencer, who has been reading Trethewey’s work since high school. “Her 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’s also very humorous, which made the students feel connected to her.”
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’s stature and talent through Hollins and during Spencer’s 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.
Like Trethewey has for her, Spencer hopes her poetry will encourage others to create art: “Being 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.”
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.
Spencer hatched another dream last September as she listened to one of her literary idols talk about art’s profound impact on tragedy and community. Someday, Spencer might speak at an Artemis launch, tracing her own legacy on the circle of Hollins talent that has helped to shape the journal created to inspire infinite futures.