Literary magazine launch features Pulitzer-winning U.S. poet laureate with Roanoke Valley ties

Event update, 8:15 p.m. Sept. 5: Nikki Giovanni, who had been scheduled to introduce Natasha Trethewey at Friday’s event, will not be able to attend, organizers said Thursday evening.

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Artemis Magazine began in 1977 as a showcase for art and writing by women, a special project of a women’s resource center run by the Roanoke organization Total Action for Progress, or TAP.

That women’s resource center has long since closed, but the magazine lives on, returning after a hiatus to become the Roanoke Valley’s highest-profile annual literary venture. Though most of the poets and artists who fill the Artemis tables of contents hail from Southwest Virginia, contributions have come from across the country and even overseas.

“Our survival is a testament to the power of creativity and collaboration,” wrote Artemis founder and editor Jeri Rogers in the forward to the latest volume. “Our enduring legacy is a testament to the many volunteers who have dedicated their time and effort to make this journal a reality.”

On Friday, the premiere of Artemis’ 31st issue in 47 years will reach another high-water mark: The 19^th U.S. poet laureate, Natasha Trethewey, will be both the volume’s featured poet and the featured reader at the launch event, which starts at 5 p.m. at the Taubman Museum of Art.

“It’s just been a dream come true,” Rogers said. “It’s going to benefit our community so much.”

For two terms, from 2012-2014, Trethewey served as the nation’s poet laureate. Among many other honors, she’s received the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, a lifetime achievement award from the Library of Congress, and a Pulitzer Prize for her third collection of poetry, “Native Guard,” a cycle of poems about Black soldiers who fought for the Union in the Civil War. At present, she directs the creative writing program at Northwestern University in Illinois.

Though born in Mississippi, Trethewey, 58, has a deep Roanoke Valley connection. Her father, the late Eric Trethewey, an accomplished poet in his own right, taught creative writing at Hollins University for 30 years. One of his students was his own daughter — Natasha Trethewey earned her master’s degree from Hollins in 1991. She told The Roanoke Times in 2012 that even though her father had encouraged her to write poetry since she was a child, she gained even more by learning from him formally.

Neither of the Tretheweys has been a stranger to the pages of Artemis. Eric Trethewey served on the Artemis board of directors in the 1990s, Rogers said. With the late Richard Dillard, another Hollins creative writing teacher and poet, “he actually helped establish an archival section for all the Artemises ever published,” she said.

When Artemis returned to a regular publishing schedule in 2014, Eric Trethewey’s history of involvement with the magazine “opened the door to every year, contacting Natasha and saying, ‘Would you, could you, could we publish one of your poems?’” Rogers said. 

The younger Trethewey permitted Artemis to regularly reprint her work. “I mean, she’s terrific. She’s amazing,” Rogers said.

However, bringing Natasha Trethewey to speak in Roanoke for the launch of the new issue took a village, as the saying goes. For their assistance in realizing this dream, Rogers praised the Roanoke Arts Commission, Roanoke Libraries Director Sheila Umberger, Taubman Executive Director Cindy Petersen, and philanthropist Joanne Cassullo, director of the Dorothea L. Leonhardt Foundation, who serves on the boards of trustees for Roanoke College, the Taubman Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

“We’ve partnered with Artemis Journal for more than a decade to celebrate art and poetry in our region,” Petersen said. “We’re honored that Natasha Trethewey — an internationally recognized poet — will be part of this year’s event.”

Rogers said the idea came to her after she selected the new issue’s theme, “Illuminating the Darkness,” and chose the poem from Trethewey that she hoped to include. That piece, called “Enlightenment,” was first collected in the poet’s book “Thrall,” which contains historical and social explorations and personal meditations on what it means to be the mixed-race daughter of a white father.

A native of Nova Scotia, Canada, Eric Trethewey married social worker Gwendolyn Turnbough in Cincinnati because it was illegal for them to marry in the state where they met, Kentucky. She was Black, he was white, and they continued to endure discrimination and threats after moving to Mississippi, where interracial marriage was also barred. They divorced when Natasha was a child. 

Turnbough moved to Atlanta and remarried. Her second husband turned abusive and, in 1985, shot and killed her. Natasha Trethewey’s 2020 memoir reckoning with the trauma of her mother’s murder, “Memorial Drive,” became a New York Times bestseller, described by former President Barack Obama as a wrenching but surprisingly uplifting read.

“Enlightenment” focuses on a smaller yet still telling moment in Natasha Trethewey’s childhood, recounting a visit she and her father took to Monticello, meditating on Thomas Jefferson’s troubling legacy as a slave owner who fathered children with one of the slaves he owned and how the contemplation of that legacy resonated with her own experiences growing up. The poem ranges through sorrow, anger and even humor in a mere 54 lines.

The new issue of Artemis also includes poems by Eric Trethewey and world-renowned New River Valley poet Nikki Giovanni. The volume concludes with the poem “The Ephemerality of Incense” by Virginia Tech engineering student Ayah Ali, the 2024 winner of the $1,500 Giovanni-Steger Undergraduate Poetry Prize, a competition founded in 2006 by Giovanni and the late Virginia Tech President Charles Steger. 

Prior to the launch Friday evening, up to 50 students each from Roanoke College, Hollins University, Virginia Tech, Radford University and Ferrum College will come to the Taubman for a conversation with Trethewey that will simultaneously be livestreamed to historically Black colleges and universities. The museum will record the session for posterity.

“Here’s really just one of the most exciting parts of this,” Rogers said.