Artemis Speaks

When the great environmental writer Edward Abbey died in 1989, four friends buried him secretly in a hidden desert spot that no one would ever find. The final resting place of the Thoreau of the American West remains unknown and has become part of American folklore. In his book FINDING ABBY, Sean Prentiss goes on an odyssey looking for Abbey's grave and combines an account of his quest with a creative biography of Abbey.

Sean Prentiss takes readers across the country as he gathers clues from his research, travel, and interviews with some of Abbey's closest friends. Along the way, Prentiss examines his sense of rootlessness as he unravels Abbey's complicated legacy, raising larger questions about the meaning of place and home. The result of this remarkable journey is the book, Which won the National Outdoor Book Award, the Utah Book Award for Nonfiction, and the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. 

He is also a poet, published several times by Artemis Journal, Crosscut: Poems, a memoir-in-poems about his time as a trail builder in the Pacific Northwest. He also is a co-editor of two anthologies and textbooks about the creative process. Sean serves as Backcountry Magazine's poet laureate. Currently, he is an associate professor at Norwich University in Vermont.

Before becoming a professor and writer, Sean worked as a trail builder in the Pacific Northwest and the Desert Southwest. Wherever he has lived, the power of stories and the power of place has been a part of his life.

Annie Waldrop is a multi-media artist living and working in Roanoke, Va. In addition to exhibiting work up and down the east coast, she recently had a major solo exhibition at The Turchin Center at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. She studied at Parsons School of Design in New York City and acquired her master's degree at The Maryland Institute College of Art In Baltimore, Md. Her current focus combines various skills, including sculpture and painting, into ideas surrounding Buddhist philosophy and the  Dharma teachings.  

https://anniewaldrop.net/

Betty Branch is an artist who is constantly reinventing herself. Her media is diverse; She sculpts in wax, clay, fiber, straw, and stone. Throughout her career in intensive production, she has culled visual references from ancient matriarchal civilizations to current cultural events, from Greece to the foothills of the Blue Ridge. Her work is defined by lifelong tenets: the body, rites of passage, the intersection between land and form, and the myth and form of crow and raven.
 
 Branch’s award-winning art has been widely exhibited in the US and abroad, with works from small to monumental in private, corporate, university, and museum collections. She maintains a studio and gallery in Roanoke, VA.
 
 www.bettybranch.com

Starroot grew up in Southern Germany and started to create art at an early age, inspired by nature and her unlimited fantasy. She explored and practiced conscious dreaming in her early childhood. She is an entirely self-taught artist. When she was 30 years old, she had a life-changing Out of Body experience in a car accident. Starroot opened more and more for visions coming to her. In 1986 she moved with her two children to Tennessee and then to the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

Many war books have been written the horrors of combat. All the Ruined Men explores how difficult and confusing it can be afterward to come back home. All the Ruined Men is a book of linked stories that show veterans struggling to adjust to civilian life after years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a combat veteran, and  a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division, Bill served in the Gulf War as part of the first units deployed to prevent Saddam Hussein from invading Saudi Arabia. After months of tension, He was part of the ground invasion into Iraq, charging through sand dunes littered with dead bodies.

"I took after my father, a Vietnam vet who never spoke about his war. Stoicism was his fortress. It became mine too. Silence served as a tolerable stopgap for a while, but once I left the Army, I had too much free time to think. Reports about scores of veteran suicides had me worried. I hadn’t considered taking my own life, but some dark vortex had me in its grip. My choices were simple: I could follow the lessons of my silent father and let my internal anger and confusion grow until they exploded, or I could try something different. So I began to write about my experiences and those of other soldiers fighting in our seemingly never-ending wars. What I learned was that words had the power to heal. And that healing could be shared—with other veterans, with their families, with anyone curious about what it’s like to go to war and come home with serious emotional baggage." Bill Glose

Donnie Secreast is co-editor of Artemis Journal and is a Ph.D. candidate in Literary Studies at Texas A&M University. She grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains, originally from Radford, Virginia, with roots in Western North Carolina.

Her research interests include the intersections of ecocriticism and humor in Cold War-era
women’s writing. Her scholarship on Sylvia Plath appears in the journal Studies in the Novel,
and her writing on Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring can be read in the journal Interdisciplinary
Studies in Literature and Environment

Sylvia Plath (/plæθ/; October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet, novelist, and short-story writer. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for two of her published collections, The Colossus and Other Poems (1960) and Ariel (1965), as well as The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death by suicide in 1963.

The Collected Poems were published in 1981, and Plath was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1982 posthumously.

Secreast's scholarship on Sylvia Plath appears in the journal Studies in the Novel, and my writing on Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring can be read in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment.

Links:

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/750706

 https://academic.oup.com/isle/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/isle/isab021/6250915?login=false

Alessio Zanelli is an Italian poet who writes in English, a language he has learned completely as an autodidact. His work has appeared in some 200 literary journals from 17 countries including, in the USA: Artemis, California Quarterly, Concho River Review, Italian Americana, The Lyric, North Dakota Quarterly, Philosophy And Literature, Potomac Review, Worcester Review, and World Literature Today, among about a hundred more. His fifth original collection, titled The Secret Of Archery, was published in 2019 by Greenwich Exchange (London). For more information please visit www.alessiozanelli.it.

A River Road Memoir is a journey through a young girl’s idyllic childhood in the rural South to her restless adolescence when the Civil Rights struggle becomes urgent and personal to her family. The unfolding story is told through the second daughter’s eyes. Jane is a serious child, the one her father calls, “a tree full of owls,” always thinking, observing, and wondering about meanings.

Unresolved conflicts continue around the family table as the Civil Rights movement evolves, the Vietnam War begins, and chemical plants spring-like poison mushrooms along the river.

Set in the 1950s and 1960s, the conflicts reflected in this book are hauntingly familiar to readers today as Americans continue to battle over the nation’s identity and values.

JANE GOETTE, a Louisiana native, is a teacher, writer, and mother of three. Jane has volunteered with Artemis Journal and served as Associate Editor 2018-2020. She resides in Virginia.

The renowned poet, Nikki Giovanni has a new album  “The Gospel According To Nikki Giovanni.”

In addition to publishing dozens of poetry works, Nikki Giovanni has recorded several spoken word albums over the course of 50 years. But this time, she’s doing something a little different.

The new album,  a collaboration with saxophonist Javon Jackson, is a collection of gospel hymns and spirituals set to jazz. Growing up in the Baptist church, Giovanni says gospel music was instrumental to understanding herself as a poet.

“The spirituals had a message,” she says. “They weren't just some people woke up one morning or came from working in the evening and said, ‘Oh, let's sit down and sing.’ They were sharing information with each other.”

" The truth exists in the world and it is the job of the poet to pull the truth out of violentical air and place it with care upon the page to be casted from the mouth to the hearts of the people."  
– Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother, Irreversible Entanglements)

Steven Kenny is a renowned painter who recently moved to the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. He was born in Peekskill, New York in 1962 and now resides in Check, VA. He attended the Rhode Island School of Design,  After studying independently in Rome he gained notoriety as a freelance commercial illustrator, later devoting his full attention to fine art. His award-winning paintings are exhibited in galleries and museums across the United States and Europe.

"I believe future generations will look back on the period you and I now live in and will consider [Steven Kenny] one of the leading artists emblematic of contemporary painting in the first quarter and more of the 21st Century. 
        - Paul Chimera, Dali historian with The Salvador Dali Society and author of the book, Dali & His Doctor: The Surreal Friendship Between Salvador Dali and Dr. Edmund Klein

Steven Kenny Studio
web: www.stevenkenny.com
instagram: stevenkennyart