PVCC Names Poet Laureate and Visual Arts Luminary

After a hiatus in 2025, the Virginia Community College System is hosting the second statewide Poet Laureate and Visual Arts Luminary competitions from March 27-28 in Roanoke, with the theme of the competition being “I Dream.” Each school in the VCCS system will name a poet laureate and a visual arts luminary to compete for the VCCS positions. 

On Feb. 25, the winners and runners-up of the PVCC competitions were celebrated during an event in the Main Building’s Event Space, during which each poet and artist presented their piece and spoke briefly about their inspiration and artistic process. The winners of each competition received $300, and the runners-up received $100.

Mica Girstantas won first place for his collection of haikus, titled “Static.” Girstantas mostly writes “when I’m thinking about my girlfriend,” he said. “When she’s asleep, and I’m awake, and she’s dreaming, and I’m dreaming.” 

Erika Howsare, a Charlottesville-based author whose nonfiction book, The Age of Deer, was published in 2024, served as the judge for the Poet Laureate competition. She described Girstantas’ collection as “consistently surprising,” and complimented how each poem fit into a larger picture: “Like bricks in a wall, something bigger was being built.”

Catherine Selfridge and Margaret Ryan-Byrne were named as the runners-up in the poetry competition. Each presented one of three of their submitted poems. Selfridge’s “Wisconsin” was inspired by the feeling of growing out of touch with a friend when a long distance lies in between, and Ryan-Byrne’s “how to never die” was a sensory-detail-filled exploration of “sickness in humanity, and death,” according to Ryan-Byrne.

The winner of the Arts Luminary competition, which was judged by local artist Karen Eide, was Rex Freas, whose mixed-media piece “Mother of Exiles: American Dreams” depicts a distraught Lady Liberty drawn with charcoal on an American flag. Freas, who drew inspiration from the poetry of Langston Hughes, said the piece is about “The American Dream, and how it looks in the world we live in today.” 

Second place was awarded to Blissful Atwell, whose drawing “Storytellers” shows groups of people across time collectively creating the same stories. “No matter when or where,” Atwell said, “we are all brought together by the stories that we tell.” Third place was awarded to the photography done by Vera Malone.

Associate Professor of Art Fenella Belle and Associate Professor of English Scott Weaver were in charge of organizing the Arts Luminary and Poet Laureate competitions, respectively. “It was a very cool opportunity,” Weaver said, “It’s been very exciting just to see people kind of, like, engage with poetry, and look at poems, because oftentimes, we think about poetry as something that happened in the past, that people wrote in the past.” 

Belle said that the first iterations of the VCCS competitions in 2024 were inspired by that same idea. “It was actually inspired by Amanda Gorman’s poem at the Biden inauguration,” Belle said. Gorman was 23 when she spoke at former President Biden’s inauguration. Belle said it was very inspiring “to see somebody young doing something creative and getting the spotlight and letting them use their voice.”

The goal of the contests for VCCS and PVCC is to encourage creativity in students and to make poetry and visual arts more accessible. “I think when it comes to art, people get super intimidated and they think it’s not for them,” Belle said. “You probably sing along with your favorite song in the car, right? It doesn’t make you a singer. I’m a terrible singer, but I still sing at the top of my lungs. and enjoy it. Get a lot out of it. I feel like that’s the same with the visual arts world.” Belle said she wants to “not have art be something on an Ivory Tower.” 

Weaver echoed the same sentiment, saying that the competitions can serve to take art “out of the museum or out of the library, putting them into everyday life.” All winning pieces in the 2026 PVCC Poet Laureate and Arts Luminary contests can be viewed online, while copies of the poetry and prints of the art pieces are currently on display in the Main Building Event Space.