51 episodes

By making the world a more beautiful place, Artemis Speaks interviews writers and artists from the Appalachian Region of the Blue Ridge Mountains and beyond. This is a time we need to write and make art for the sake of healing our souls and enriching our communities. This podcast is a production of the Artemis Journal, a charitable organization now 43 years old and has evolved to be an all inclusive yearly journal with essays, poetry and art.

Artemis Speaks Jeri Rogers

    • Arts
    • 5.0 • 3 Ratings

By making the world a more beautiful place, Artemis Speaks interviews writers and artists from the Appalachian Region of the Blue Ridge Mountains and beyond. This is a time we need to write and make art for the sake of healing our souls and enriching our communities. This podcast is a production of the Artemis Journal, a charitable organization now 43 years old and has evolved to be an all inclusive yearly journal with essays, poetry and art.

    Michele Evans, Poet and Teacher

    Michele Evans, Poet and Teacher

    Michele Evans, a fifth-generation Washingtonian (D.C.), is a poet, writer, high school English teacher, and adviser for her school's literary magazine, Unbound. Before becoming an educator, Michele Evans studied at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts; King’s College in London, England; and the Graduate School at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland. This 2023 Pushcart Prize nominee and winner of The ASP Bulletin poetry contest has been published in Artemis, The Write Launch, Tangled Locks, Sky Island Journal, Maryland Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her poem "anticlea" won first place in the 2023 ASP Bulletin poetry contest sponsored by Alan Squire Publishing. purl, her debut collection of poetry, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2025. You can find her at www.awordsmithie.com or @awordsmithie on Instagram.


    "Working in a school system is “heart” work. You keep our students at the center of every conversation, decision, and in everything you do. You know every student by name and by need and go above and beyond to provide students with what they need to succeed."
    Dr.  White, Roanoke City schools

    • 22 min
    Linda Atkinson, artist

    Linda Atkinson, artist

    Linda Atkinson is a sculptor living and working in Botetourt County.  She taught art history for 21 years at Virginia Western Community College, as well as studio courses for University /Santa Cruz, Hollins College,  Roanoke College, and Radford University among others.  Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and Atlanta.  She spent 15 years in California and taught sculpture and 3-D design at the University of California/Santa Cruz.  “I believe that the artist is an envoy of the human spirit whose job it is to reestablish the “enchanted” dimensions at the core of human existence—poetry, myth, passion, imagination, true love, magic, the marvelous, dreams.”


    linda.atkinson111@gmail.com

    • 33 min
    A.J. Gnuse, Artemis Journal Literary Editor and Writer Girl in the Walls

    A.J. Gnuse, Artemis Journal Literary Editor and Writer Girl in the Walls

    A. J. Gnuse is the bestselling author of Girl in the Walls, published in 2021. 
    He received an MFA in fiction from UNC Wilmington, and his writing has appeared in the Guardian, Gulf Coast, Literary Hub, Los Angeles Review, and other venues. 
    A native of New Orleans, he lives in Texas, where he is a literary co-editor of Artemis Journal alongside his wife, Donnie Secreast.

    “The novel begins as an eerie meditation on grief, family dysfunction, and things that go bump in the night. But about halfway through, Gnuse’s masterfully crafted slow burn ignites into a hair-raising thriller that is as unnerving as it is unexpected.”
                - Atlanta Journal-Constitution

    “Girl in the Walls poses the question — how well do we really know where we live? . . . Gnuse tugs the seemingly insignificant into the spotlight and holds it there. He makes the forgotten and easily brushed-away threads of the story crystal clear while entwining a narrative of growing up and learning to live with, while not clinging to trauma. It is a story focused on the psychological without prescribing itself as such; it entertains while providing a mirror to analyze the fears that make us leave our lights on just a little bit longer each night.”
                - Southern Review of Books 

    • 35 min
    Javon Jackson, Jazz Saxophonist collaborating with acclaimed Poet, Nikki Giovanni

    Javon Jackson, Jazz Saxophonist collaborating with acclaimed Poet, Nikki Giovanni

    The Moss Center in Blacksburg, Virginia presented a live performance and historic collaboration between renowned poet and Virginia Tech legend Nikki Giovanni and saxophonist-composer and former Jazz Messenger Javon Jackson. Their collaboration for over a year has yielded the CD The Gospel According to Nikki Giovanni.

    For an intimate jazz performance, Jackson brought his bold-toned, Trane-inspired tenor lines to bear on a series of hymns, spirituals, and gospel numbers hand-picked by Giovanni. The live performance also included jazz singer, Nnenna Freelon. This collaboration with Nikki Giovanni produced Jackson's fifth album for his Solid Jackson Records label. 

    With a remarkable career as a Jazz saxophonist, Jackson released a potent tribute to a towering influence, Celebrating John Coltrane. His inaugural release on Solid Jackson Records featured the venerable drummer and former Coltrane collaborator Jimmy Cobb. He followed later in 2012 with Lucky 13, which featured the great soul-jazz keyboardist Les McCann and included a mellow instrumental rendition of Stevie Wonder's "Don't You Worry' Bout a Thing" along with a version of McCann's 1969 hit, "Compared to What." 

    That same remarkably productive year, Jackson received the prestigious Benny Golson Award from Howard University in Washington, D.C., for recognition of excellence in jazz. Jackson's debut on the Smoke Sessions label, 2014's Expression, was a live quartet recording from the Smoke Jazz & Supper Club in Upper Manhattan. 

    https://javonjackson.com/

    • 37 min
    Dr. Sandee McGlaun, Poet, Reading by Skip Brown

    Dr. Sandee McGlaun, Poet, Reading by Skip Brown

    River Sequence (a Meditation)
    1. Riffle
    This moment: like a fat round plum smooth as stone tumbled downstream, at the edge of stillness poised to roll. How long does it take a rock to travel the length of a river? How long does it take a mind to wind its way through a memory? Hold the present, juicy and heavy, in the palm of your hand. Loosen the fist of time and lean back, eyes closed, into turbulent water. Let the current lift your feet.
    2. Run
    A river begins at a clear, cold spring and flows one direction, riffles, runs, pools, and again. Time, too, moves forward in its eternal current, past-present-future. We try to contain it in rows of tidy boxes: line follows line, page follows page. A map draws a blue line we can trace with a finger on folded paper. When you stand in the river and look to its future, the current presses hard against the backs of your legs.
    3. Pool
    Yet we live days that feel like minutes, minutes that enlarge, engulf years. The river too seeps sideways into the soil of its banks, spreads wide and flat and far when it floods. Water evaporates up into mist and fog, falls back down as rain, each drop rippling out, mosaic of many circles. Still we float along, certain we know where the current will take us. Still we say: the river flows to the sea.
    4. Riffle
    At sea’s edge time passes more slowly than in higher climes, the scientists say, more slowly for feet than head. Are we drawn toes to tide because its pulse stretches our narrow days? Time: a wave rolling back on itself, a company of shimmering hourglasses that curl continuously toward the future until they end where they began. There is no time, the scientists say. Things happen. What if there is no time? Hard truth. Strange comfort.
    Sandee McGlaun

    • 3 min
    Lara Taubman, Songwriter

    Lara Taubman, Songwriter

    New York-based country-soul singer/songwriter Lara Taubman delivers sobering subjects like mortality, mental health, spirituality, survival, and finding hope in an exceedingly turbulent & traumatized world on her sophomore album, Ol’ Kentucky Light, out September 16th on Atomic Sound Record Company.

    Taubman clearly didn’t just stumble upon her muse. She channels her earliest influences—the classic country of Patsy Cline, the great gospel of Mavis Staples, The Staple Singers, and Mahalia Jackson, and the contemporary folk largess as filtered through Joni Mitchell. She reveals herself in her music.

    http://www.larataubman.com

    • 34 min

Customer Reviews

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3 Ratings

catsleeper3000 ,

Love this podcast!

I’m a big fan of the lit journal behind this podcast, & these interviews with the authors & artists featured in the journal have been so inspirational! Looking forward to more episodes from this team & community.

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