Mission
Through nurturing and encouraging Black women writers, Wintergreen Women Writers Collective will publish, document, preserve, and celebrate their creative work.
Vision
The history and legacy of Black women writers are honored and preserved. Black women writers have access to intergenerational spaces where, in community and mutuality, they can nurture one another and locate resources to support their creative practice.
In 1987, renowned author and activist Nikki Giovanni moved to Virginia as a Commonwealth Visiting Professor at Virginia Tech. In her honor, Dr Joanne Gabbin organized a small gathering of Black women writers at Wintergreen Resort. What began that day as a simple celebration of sisterhood and life blossomed into something much more.
Now, almost four decades later, the Wintergreen Women Writers Collective offers workshops, retreats, and opportunities for Black women writers to connect, hone their craft, and gain exposure. By doing this, the Collective sustains a literary sisterhood focused on "Sacred Work"—creating in a safe, welcoming space that centers the encouragement and support of Black writing and culture, by nurturing each of the women as writers, scholars, and artists.
At Wintergreen, members have workshopped and critiqued each other's work, offering guidance not only on pedagogy but even on publishing, promoting, and naming books. The annual retreats have served as nourishing spaces for seeds of ideas that have resulted in programs, conferences, centers, and organizations.
The Collective's range of public and private work has produced a supportive environment for mission-aligned institutions and organizations like Furious Flower Poetry Center, History of Black Writing, and Cave Canem. The Collective provides a haven for generational perspectives where emerging writers learn from celebrated authors and in turn spark new ideas. It is a place where the women go to heal, transform, and renew themselves. It provides a way to support systemic change in our communities while bringing about personal transformation.
The Wintergreen Retreat: A Sacred Space
Since 1987, the Wintergreen Annual Retreat has offered a sacred, intergenerational space for Black women writers—poets, scholars, critics, storytellers—to come together in the Blue Ridge Mountains for rest, reflection, and renewal. Held annually at Wintergreen Resort, this private retreat is a space where emerging and established voices alike are nurtured and celebrated, and where the act of writing is honored as both craft and cultural legacy. Participation is limited to members of the Wintergreen Women Writers Collective.
The Beginning & Becoming of Wintergreen
Key milestones in the Collective’s journey toward advancing its mission:
Our Ways of Being
Wintergreen Women embody qualities that shape our community and guide our work. These traits reflect who we are and what we stand for as a collective. We are:
Storied
Scholarly
Nurturing
Visionary
Collaborative
Our Values in Action
The Wintergreen Women Writers Collective is deeply care-ful in how we nurture relationships and craft, creating space for empowerment where writers can claim their voices and creative potential. We celebrate creativity at every stage, embody resilience through collective support, and commit to preservation by safeguarding our shared literary legacy.
Individual Wisdom, Collective Legacy
Wintergreen’s work is held and guided by a dedicated circle of writers, scholars, organizers, and cultural stewards. Our project team shapes and carries forward the daily work of the collective, while our board provides vision, grounding, and continuity. Together, they ensure that Wintergreen’s legacy remains both rooted and responsive.
Project Team
-
Joanne Gabbin
Executive Director
-
Opal Moore
Programs & Partnerships Coordinator
-
Mehron Price
Project Coordinator
-
Alysia Dempsey
Communications Specialist
Board
-
Joanne Gabbin
Board President & Founder
-
Tyechia Lynn Thompson
Grad Fellowship Chair
-
Trudier Harris
Treasurer & Finance Committee Chair
-
Sandra Govan
Historian
-
Maryemma Graham
Torch Literary Arts Partnership Chair
-
Latorial Faison
Retreat Committee Chair 2025
-
Daryl Cumber Dance
Vice-President & Nominating Committee Chair
-
Opal Moore
Editorial Committee Chair & Secretary
-
Alysia Dempsey
Communications Specialist
A Note from the Founder:
“I know a place”
As I think back to September 1987 when I invited a group of women writers to the Wintergreen Resort to welcome Nikki Giovanni to Virginia, I remember my distinct feelings of expectation and exhilaration. Expectation: we, Black women writers in the academy, would come together in a kind of literary sisterhood to discuss the joys and challenges of teaching in places that were not always welcoming. We would share a sacred space to talk about our writing and get precious feedback which would encourage us to continue writing. We would form a bond that protected us from the racist, sexist, and parochial notions prevalent in academia.
Exhilaration: we were meeting in a time that had already been charged by the literary successes of such writers as Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, June Jordan, and Audre Lorde in the 1970s and 1980s, as detailed by Courtney Thorsson in The Sisterhood: How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture (2023). We, the founding members—Nikki Giovanni, Daryl Cumber Dance, Paule Marshall, Trudier Harris, Opal Moore, Sandra Govan, Carmen Gillespie, and Joanne Gabbin—were excited to be together, excited that our retreat house, nestled in the mountains of the Blue Ridge, would give us the space to reflect and rejuvenate.
Nikki expresses it this way: "...riding the night winds, our hearts skip across the clouds, coming to rest on a distant star called possibility, we arrive at Wintergreen. Good for us.”
I remember that we shared delicious meals and engaging conversations around the dinner table. And the stories flowed as though they had been dammed up too long. More than twenty years later, we shared some of these stories in Shaping Memories: Reflections of African American Women Writers (2009). As we left our first retreat 38 years ago, we could not imagine that the sisterhood that we formed would sustain us and draw many other Black women writers to the Wintergreen experience. In truth, many of the challenges that we faced then are prevalent now. However, we hope that the creativity, academic innovation, and institution building that the Wintergreen Women Writers Collective represents will serve as a model for other writing groups who desire a place to listen, write, discover, and belong.
Warmest regards,
Joanne V. Gabbin
Executive Director
Acknowledgements
Programmatic activities of the Wintergreen Women Writers Collective are made possible in part by support from the Mellon Foundation, through an implementation grant that builds on a prior planning grant. This support helps sustain Wintergreen’s mission to cultivate intergenerational community, creativity, and literary legacy among Black women writers.
We also extend our gratitude and appreciation to the organizations and institutions that have partnered with us in various capacities, each helping to advance our mission: