![\"Courtney](\"http:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/legum.jpg\")
Even after delivering more than 1,000 babies, obstetrician-gynecologist Courtney Legum-Wenk still gets misty-eyed talking about the process of bringing new life into the world. \u201cIt never, never gets old,\u201d she says. \u201cEvery delivery is such a phenomenal experience.\u201d<\/p>\n
Four of those babies were daughters of Hollins alumnae who were all born within a nine-month period over 2015 and 2016. On Legum-Wenk ‘s birthday, March 23, she donned scrubs to assist with the 12:25 p.m. delivery of one of her senior-year roommates, Amanda Mascelli Christopher \u201903. Later that day, Legum-Wenk posted on Facebook how honored she felt to share her special day with newly born Virginia, called \u201cVivi.\u201d \u201cHonor does not even begin to describe the feeling,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n
Legum-Wenk also delivered the daughters of Miggie Bray Mustian \u201901, Savon Shelton Sampson \u201904, and Marcail Moran Waskom \u201902. Erica Feiste \u201903 travels from Chesapeake, Virginia, to see Dr. Legum-Wenk as her gynecologist.<\/p>\n
Recently, Legum-Wenk joined Hollins\u2019 pre-med council so she can share the joys of her job and talk to students about how to follow in her footsteps. \u201cThe preprofessional councils offer support and advice to students about applying to professional school\u2014medical school in this case,\u201d explains Nikki Johnson Williams \u201998, M.A.L.S. \u201913, executive director of alumnae relations.<\/p>\n
Legum-Wenk, who majored in biology and minored in women’s studies, shadowed an ob-gyn in high school, but by the time the Staunton native found herself at Hollins, she wasn’t convinced a stethoscope was in her future.<\/p>\n
\u201cEveryone around me kept telling me I was going to go to medical school,\u201d she recalls. \u201cI knew I wanted to do something with sciences. That\u2019s just how my brain works. But I rebelled a little bit and said, \u2018I\u2019m not going to go to medical school because that\u2019s what everyone else wants me to do.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
But during her junior year, Legum-Wenk spent her free time shadowing a family friend who was an ob-gyn, who traveled to rural Virginia once a month to offer a clinic. \u201cHe treated women who drove hundreds of miles to see him,\u201d she recalls. \u201cI saw things I haven\u2019t seen in my own private practice that he did. I was hooked.\u201d<\/p>\n
After getting a master\u2019s degree in bioethics at the University of Virginia, she headed to the Edward Via Virginia College of Osteopathic Medicine in Blacksburg, where she graduated in 2008. After completing her residency in obstetrics and gynecology at Memorial Health Medical Center, through Mercer University in Savannah, Georgia, Legum-Wenk began a private practice in Richmond. \u201cIt\u2019s a rewarding life,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
![\"divider\"](\"http:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/wave.png\")
<\/p>\n
![\"Keisha](\"http:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/keisha.jpg\")
Growing up in Sacramento, California, and later as a student at Hollins, Keisha Graziadei-Shup \u201909 gravitated toward people from diverse backgrounds. Her best friend in high school was Hungarian. At Hollins, her closest friend had Dominican and Puerto Rican origins. \u201cMy family was mixed too,\u201d says Graziadei-Shup, a second-generation American on her father\u2019s side, who is from Brazil.<\/p>\n
Things changed when Graziadei-Shup embarked on post-Hollins life as a young professional in the Roanoke Valley. \u201cWhy,” she asked herself one day, \u201care all my friends white? I know there are more than white people living in this town.\u201d Graziadei-Shup also worried about losing the language skills she\u2019d developed at Hollins as a double major in Spanish and communication studies.<\/p>\n
The epiphany spurred Graziadei-Shup to volunteer with Local Colors, a Roanoke nonprofit dedicated to promoting multicultural understanding, as well as the city\u2019s annual multicultural festival. As Graziadei-Shup got to know more Hispanic Roanokers, she realized that there was no publication that \u201cwould help connect them with what\u2019s going on in the Latino world.\u201d<\/p>\n
LaConexi\u00f3nVa.org, a Roanoke-based bilingual community news website, was born. A web design company executive from Graziadei-Shup\u2019s church donated enough money to get a site up and running in English and Spanish. A few months following the April 2015 launch of the first monthly issue of LaConexi\u00f3n, the project was absorbed by Blue Ridge Literacy, a Roanoke nonprofit. That arrangement saved Graziadei-Shup the headache of forming her own organization, as well as providing her with administrative support and bookkeeping help.<\/p>\n
Sara Baygents \u201916, a Spanish major, spent a semester her senior year interning at the website. \u201cWorking at LaConexi\u00f3n definitely helped me to better understand and relate to the Latino immigrant community in the United States,\u201d she says. Baygents puts that experience to work at her current job as an elementary-school paraprofessional who works with immigrant families, and at graduate school at George Mason University, where she\u2019s getting a master\u2019s degree in education and focusing on teaching culturally, linguistically diverse, and exceptional learners.<\/p>\n
After Graziadei-Shup launched LaConexi\u00f3n, Roanoke’s Latino community developed more ways to stay connected, including a center for the Hispanic community that offers language classes, workshops, and social gatherings and two Roanoke-based publications covering communities of color. Graziadei-Shup decided that rather than duplicating efforts, she plans to end LaConexi\u00f3n in early 2017 and work to support those endeavors.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs other agencies in the community have emerged that can fill this gap in new ways, I\u2019m excited to rally behind them and begin exploring new opportunities,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Profiles by Beth JoJack ’98<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Courtney Legum-Wenk \u201903 Even after delivering more than 1,000 babies, obstetrician-gynecologist Courtney Legum-Wenk still gets misty-eyed talking about the process of bringing new life into the world. \u201cIt never, never gets old,\u201d she says. \u201cEvery delivery is such a phenomenal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[68],"class_list":["post-7083","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-web_only","tag-winter-2017"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7083","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7083"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7083\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7116,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7083\/revisions\/7116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}