The Artemis community shares in the deep sorrow of losing our cherished poet, Nikki Giovanni. For ten years, she served as our Distinguished Poet on the Board, and her contributions were invaluable to the heart of our poetry journal. We feel this loss deeply and will carry her spirit and legacy with us as we move forward. She will always be missed, but her words and impact will live on in our hearts.
Nikki Giovanni at the showing of her award winning documentary By Sundance Film Festival “Going to Mars” with Jeri Rogers, Editor of Artemis.
Nikki Giovanni to join Artemis Editorial Board as our Honored Board Poet
Artemis is pleased to have acclaimed poet, Nikki Giovanni to join our publication. She has been awarded an unprecedented 7 NAACP Image Awards, nominated for a Grammy; has been a finalist for the National Book Award, authored 3 New York Times and Los Angeles Times Best Sellers, which is highly unusual for a poet. She is Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech.
Artemis has had a long journey with Nikki. She has been our featured guest poet for our journals in 2014 and 2017. In 2017 we dedicated our journal to her as someone who has served as a beacon to those of us who believe in the power of art. From the 1980’s until today, she has given generously of her time and talent to nurture and support the work of artists and writers in her adopted home here in Southwest Virginia. We welcome her as our Honored Board Poet.
The Artemis community shares in the deep sorrow of losing our cherished poet, Nikki Giovanni. For ten years, she served as our Distinguished Poet on the Board, and her contributions were invaluable to the heart of our poetry journal. We feel this loss deeply and will carry her spirit and legacy with us as we move forward. She will always be missed, but her words and impact will live on in our hearts.
Nikki Giovanni and Jeri Rogers, Editor Artemis at the screening of the Sundance Film best documentary “Going to Mars”
“The door is open,” Nikki Giovanni told me, “and if I’m saying something that you don’t like, you can go out the door. Because I’m going to say what I think I should say.” The poet and longtime Virginia Tech professor, who released the “The Gospel According to Nikki Giovanni,” a musical collaboration with the saxophonist Javon Jackson, was talking about her approach to teaching difficult material.
She could just as well have been talking about her approach to life. Beginning with her first book, “Black Feeling, Black Talk” in 1968, and on through to “Make Me Rain” in 2020, Giovanni’s writing has expressed a great many forceful ideas — about love, race, politics, gender — but a large share of its power has always come from the sense that the poet is telling the truth as she sees it, to whoever happens to hear. “I cannot close my door,” says Giovanni, who was 81 when she passed. “I just can’t let that happen.”
Join the conversation with son Gary Isreal, President of the Dorothy M. Gillespie Foundation, and daughter Dorien Gillespie Bietz, children of Dorothy Gillespie, as they reflect on the many gifts their mother had in a groundbreaking documentary Courage, Independence and Color. The documentary will be shown on May 22, 2022 at the Grandin Theater in Roanoke, Va.
Artemis Journal was borne out of writing workshops for abused women. Ms. Gillespie donated her print celebrating Women in the Arts. The journal’s mission is to support, develop, and encourage the talents of artists and writers from the Blue Ridge Mountains and beyond. Now in its 48th year, Artemis Journal looks back at its beginnings.
Dorothy Gillespie, acclaimed artist, donated her pastel painting to Artemis for our first cover, which became the citie’s first mural in downtown Roanoke, Va.
To Listen to the podcast, go to our Podcast Section on this website
Jeri Rogers and the refurbished mural in year 2022 holding the first Artemis Journal with Gillespies image.
Emerging from the pandemic, we are reinventing ourselves and our commitments to art. How do we keep creating in these challenging times? Our current theme for Artemis Journal 24 is “Illuminating the Darkness.” Our editors are currently laying out the journal, and I am always in awe of how artists and writers respond to our calls for submission. With over 350 submissions, we have reduced our selections to over 100 entries. The elimination process is challenging as there are so many worthy entries, and we cannot include everyone for obvious reasons.
In looking at how history dealt with challenging times, I found a poem that intersects the personal with history. A poem by U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey, wrote Enlightenment after going to Monticello, Virginia, with her poet father, Eric Trethewey, to learn more about our complicated and revered President Thomas Jefferson. The poem is featured in the upcoming Artemis Journal 2024, released September 6th, at the Roanoke Taubman Museum of Art. Stay tuned for exciting news regarding the Launch Celebration.
Many portraits were made of Thomas Jefferson. One of the most demanding and persistent artists was Gilbert Stuart, to whom Jefferson sat for three portraits. In May of 1800, Stuart began his first portrait, and a fee of $100.00 had been paid before the painting received its finishing touches, a mistake that others had made before him. More than twenty years passed before Jefferson received an oil portrait by Stuart, and the result of the 1800 sitting had disappeared without a trace. In the meantime, Jefferson assumed the presidency. He took up residence in the Washington President’s House where Stuart lived, and in the spring of 1805, Stuart informed Jefferson that he was “not satisfied” with the original 1800 portrait and “begged” the president to sit for him again. Stuart received another $100.00 from a grateful and generous Jefferson after producing the gouache and crayon “medallion” profile, and the second portrait was titled the “Edgehill.” As the years passed, Stuart retained the portrait. He proceeded to forget the reason for its existence, assuming ownership of the painting until Jefferson enlisted intermediaries from Monticello to obtain ownership in 1821. This magnificent painting hangs in the parlor of Monticello. Virginia.
Natasha Trethewey served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States (2012-2014). She is the author of five collections of poetry, including Native Guard (2006)—for which she was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize—and, most recently, Monument: Poems New and Selected (2018); a book of non-fiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (2010); and a memoir, Memorial Drive (2020) an instant New York Times Bestseller. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Philosophical Society. In 2017 she received the Heinz Award for Arts and Humanities. A Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets since 2019, Trethewey was awarded the 2020 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt Prize in Poetry for Lifetime Achievement from the Library of Congress.
As a small independent journal, we are always planning for the next great journal
Artemis Journal has showcased compelling new voices for four decades, including notable writers ranging from Poet Laureates to Pulitzer Prize winners and first-time writers and artists. Over 2000 artists and writers have appeared in our journal. Artemis has served the Appalachian Region of the Blue Ridge Mountains with a rich history that has played an integral role in the success and perseverance of our journal.We are grateful for the continuing support of the Roanoke Arts Commission, The Taubman Museum, our contributors and donors.
Nikki Giovanni & Jeri Rogers, Editor Artemis Journal
HBO has acquired the Documentary which won the Sundance Film Festivals best documentary of 2023
In the opening scene of Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson’s searching documentary Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, the poet Nikki Giovanni shows her cards: “I don’t remember a lot of things,” she says as images of a glittering galaxy and archival footage of the poet as a child flash onscreen. “I remember what is important and I make up the rest. That’s what storytelling is all about.”
Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project wants to let Giovanni choose how she is remembered without sacrificing an allegiance to linearity and mainstream appeal. So the documentary, anchored by the vivacious personality of its subject, blends its experimental inspirations (Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro) with the duty of a compositionally legible portrait (Timothy Greenfield Sanders’ Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am).
Javon Jackson with Nikki Giovanni and Nnenna Freelon
Friday, November 3, 2023, 7:30 PM
Moss Center Virginia Tech
Blacksburg, Virginia
Street and Davis Performance Hall, Anne and Ellen Fife Theatre
“These songs are so important. They comforted people through times of slavery, and during recent years we needed them to comfort us again.”
— Nikki Giovanni
About The Gospel According to Nikki Giovanni
Why would one of poetry’s most revered voices want to curate a jazz saxophonist’s album of gospel hymns and spirituals? “These songs are so important,” says Giovanni, one of Oprah Winfrey’s 25 Living Legends and a Maya Angelou Lifetime Achievement Award winner for 2017. “They comforted people through times of slavery, and during recent years we needed them to comfort us again. But a lot of the students today do not know about the history of these songs, and they should. So I’m out here putting water on the flowers, because they need a drink.”
“The spirituals have been around so long,” says the renowned poet, activist, and educator, who came to prominence in the 1960s and ’70s as a foundational member of the Black Arts movement following the publication of such early works as 1968 book of poetry Black Feeling, Black Talk/Black Judgment and 1970’s Re:Creation.
“Some spirituals have been updated and stayed around and some have been lost over time,” Giovanni notes. “So for me, it’s just helping to keep something going. And I do it because there’s a need.”
Co-sponsored by the Black Cultural Center
A historic collaboration between renowned poet and Virginia Tech legend Nikki Giovanni and saxophonist-composer and former Jazz Messenger Javon Jackson has yielded The Gospel According to Nikki Giovanni. For this intimate jazz performance, Jackson brings his bold-toned, Trane-inspired tenor lines to bear on a series of hymns, spirituals, and gospel numbers hand-picked by Giovanni. They are joined by celebrated jazz vocalist Nnenna Freelon.
Come join in the fun and support the Journal and Taubman Museum with a program featuring Singer, and songwriter, Lara Taubman and her band.
Lara Taubman
Following a career as an Art curator, Lara turned her attention to music and began writing, producing, and singing. Her intention has always been to create work that is healing.
“2021 was the year I began to cover some classic gospel songs. Singing those deep, healing sounds sparked something profound in my body and mind. I believe part of the reason I began writing music at all was so I could climb inside of a song, to embody it. The inspiration of classic gospel brought me that experience when I wrote these songs. Being from the South and my roots in Appalachian music are not far from classic gospel music. The two kinds of music have always intermingled historically. In a way, these new songs have brought me closer to my southern background but in a deeper, more spiritual way.” Lara Taubman
“That ol’ feeling you get listening to good lo-fi music via hi-fi just got a retro update via Lara, channeling the likes of Patsy Cline and other ol’ giants of a smoky lounge scene with that signature sound that is captivatingly Lara and totally original.” RYAN MARTIN JAMMERZINE
We will also honor Dr. Sandee McGlaun, associate professor of English and director of the Writing Center, who died Sept. 4 after a long battle with breast cancer.
Her husband, Steve Prisley, posted to her social media: “The earth has lost a beautiful soul today as Sandee McGlaun left her weary and wounded body after a long and determined battle with cancer. Visit her Still Life Beyond Cancer blog to read her encouragement to hold your loved ones close, always choose kindness, and savor each moment.”
Dr. Sandee McGlaun
Her poetry will appear in the Artemis Journal alongside artist Bob Rotche, who collaborated with Professor McGlann during her last days. Here is their work as it appears in the Artemis Journal. http://www.bobroche.com
