Wintergreen News | December 2025

WINTER 2025 EDITION

A Letter from the Director:
One Spark

Rosa Parks seated on a Montgomery, AL bus

Rosa Parks reminds us of the courage that we must have to counter the intimidation and fear that we continue to face in this society.

On December 1, 70 years ago, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery transit bus, was arrested, and sparked the modern civil rights movement in the United States. A member of the Montgomery NAACP and its principal investigator of sexual assaults on Black women, she was intentional as she refused the demands of the bus driver to move to the back of the bus.

She knew too well the mores of the caste system that had relegated Black people to racially segregated spaces in most areas of Southern life. She knew first-hand about the threats of white violence and retaliation that Recy Taylor endured as she investigated Taylor’s gang rape case. Rosa Parks was also still grieving the death of 14-year-old Emmett Till, who had been murdered five months before for considering himself as good as anybody else. As Nikki Giovanni wrote in her poem “Rosa Parks,” “…it was Mrs. Rosa Parks, who could not stand that death. And in not being able to stand it. She sat back down.”

Rosa Parks reminds me of the courage that is needed to counter the intimidation and fear that we continue to face in this society. Peaceful protests, like the Montgomery Bus Boycott, can still change laws, and acts of solidarity can eradicate injustice. At this moment in December 2025, I grieve the drastic changes in our economy that benefit the rich and punish the poor; I am discouraged that innocent people, singled out as different, are being arrested, deported and treated like criminals. It is my hope that Rosa Parks’ model to refuse to accept the legalized injustices inscribed on the national body is both warning and inspiration for us all.

Wishing Peace and Solidarity,

Joanne V. Gabbin
Executive Director

Upcoming Events

Save the date for Wintergreen’s off-site event at AWP 2026 in Baltimore, MD! We will be holding a reading on Thursday, March 5, 2026 from 5:30-7pm. We are overjoyed to announce we will have the following readers:

Mahogany L Browne
Amanda Johnston
Remica Bingham-Risher
DaMaris B. Hill
Latorial Faison
Carla Du Pree
Lauren K. Alleyne
Patricia Smith

Light refreshments will be provided. We hope to see you there!

What’s New at Wintergreen?

Congratulations to Patricia Smith, winner of the 2025 National Book Award, for her book The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems. Patricia Smith is an inductee of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement. She is the author of nine acclaimed books of poetry, a Guggenheim fellow, a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and a four-time champion of the National Poetry Slam. Smith is a creative writing professor in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University and a former distinguished professor at the City University of New York.

Congratulations to Remica Bingham-Risher on being appointed the new Associate Vice Provost for Faculty Excellence and Engagement at Old Dominion University. As Associate Vice Provost for Faculty Excellence and Engagement, Professor Bingham-Risher will oversee the Center for Faculty Excellence (CFE), an expansion, redesign, and alignment of professional development that will focus on the holistic thriving of all faculty members.

Congratulations to Shani-Angela Hervey, who was selected as one of the poets for the Anthology of River Roots Poets 2025. Her work was shared at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center at the River Roots Festival in Cincinnati, Ohio on October 10th.

Check out the essay “Love Means Nothing,” from Ethel Morgan Smith, in the October 2025 issue of The Tusculum Review (reprinted from a 2007 issue). Smith describes falling in love with the global game of tennis: playing it, watching it, examining famous players, and eventually, being disappointed by professional commentators’ reactions to Venus and Serena Williams: “I blamed Martina when she said in Time magazine, ‘The tennis world accords the sisters special privileges because they are black.’ Martina, I took your poster off of my wall. And I know love in tennis means nothing.” The essay is a chilling reflection on attitudes toward the Williams’ sisters from the tennis establishment, several years before Claudia Rankine explored them in Citizen: An American Lyric.

Congratulations to Desiree Cooper on her forthcoming anthology. Pre-orders are officially open for Black Summers: Growing Up in the Urban Outdoors, coming Spring 2026 from Wayne State University Press. For more information or to place a pre-order, visit Desiree’s website.

2025: A Year in Review

In March, Wintergreen joined over 150 authors, moderators, performers, and artists in Charlottesville, Virginia for the 2025 Virginia Festival of the Book. Members of the Collective performed onstage in tribute to Wintergreen sister Nikki Giovanni and cultivated literary friendships in a supportive community.

In May, the annual Wintergreen Retreat took place at Kure Beach in North Carolina. We had a full house! We were joined by 24 Wintergreen women, including newcomer Imani Perry. We enjoyed great food, morning yoga, walks on the beach, and the traditional Saturday night reading. In addition to the rituals of play, the women were guided by Alysia Dempsey in the production a quilt in celebration of Nikki Giovanni, which was presented at the memorial program for Nikki in June ("Black Love is Black Wealth") hosted at Virginia Tech.

In 2025, Wintergreen initiated the Welcome Table Talk series, an intergenerational conversation among women writers held in partnership with Torch Literary Arts.

Our first Welcome Table Talk, held March 11, 2025, featured a conversation between Joanne Gabbin (Wintergreen) and Amanda Johnston (Torch Literary Arts) on “Building Black Feminist Institutions in Uncertain Times.” The leaders of Wintergreen and Torch held a deep conversation about what systems-building of Black literary organizations requires in the current moment.

Our July Talk brought together renowned folklore scholar Daryl Cumber Dance (Wintergreen), and celebrated author Remica Bingham-Risher (Torch Literary Arts — and Wintergreen Woman!) on the topic of “Stories from our Past: Genealogy as Creative Inspiration.” The two discussed Dance's life-long research on her family's genealogy, The Lineage of Abraham, and the astonishing resonances and geographical crossings discovered in Bingham-Risher's stunning poetry collection Room Swept Home.

Our October Talk, "Thinking about Love and the Divine," featured DaMaris B. Hill (Wintergreen) and Ajanae Dawkins (Torch Literary Arts). The two explored the capaciousness of love, what we might mean by spirituality beyond religious practice, and writing as spiritual exploration.

All told, we welcomed nearly 400 registrants this year! We look forward to continuing the series in 2026.

In June, Wintergreen sisters read Nikki Giovanni’s poem “Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea (We’re Going to Mars)” at Black Love is Black Wealth: A Celebration of the Life and Works of Nikki Giovanni at Virginia Tech. The program included musical performances, special readings, and speeches by well-known speakers, entertainers, actors, and musicians to honor the life of our dear Wintergreen sister.

Finally, we closed out 2025 with our annual in-person Board meeting in Harrisonburg, VA. This was a joyous time for shared planning, breaking bread, and celebrating the many milestones of the Collective. The weekend kicked off with a poetry reading by Pulitzer Prize-nominated poet and Wintergreen Board member, Latorial Faison, at Parentheses Books.

Wintergreen Library

Opal Moore’s recommendation: Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure and Black Feminist Thought by Bettina Judd. “What do we not know that we don’t know?...That is– language and our thoughts have failed us, will fail us, and so we must find other ways of feelin each other….” Bettina Judd’s meditation on feelin is a meditation and expansion of Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic” into a poetics of feelin (without the ‘g’ and without the diacritical mark of absence) positing feelin as sacred knowledge.

Joanne Gabbin’s recommendation: Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generatons of Black Country Cooks by Crystal Wilkinson. The book is a brilliant combination of memoir and recipe book, and the author is the master culinary wizard.

Mehron Price’s recommendation: The Power of Ritual by Casper ter Kuile. The end of the year is a fantastic time to reconsider the rituals that occupy our lives, as well as the new ones we want to enter the year to come. This book offers guidance on how to turn the everyday activities of life into meaningful, soulful practices that resonate.