For Classics Department Chair Philip Walsh P’28, the cornerstone of St. Andrew’s teaching and learning is deep, engaged relationships between educator and student. “This kind of teaching is collaborative, it's creative, it's intellectual, and it requires the talent of improvisation to allow for the imagination of students to animate the classroom,” Walsh says. “Teachers and students work closely as students dive into their curiosity and pursue the big questions they're most interested in.”

These relationships don’t end at Commencement, as proven by a new anthology co-edited by Walsh and illustrated by studio artist and alumna Emma Hunter ’25. A Folded History: Poems and Mythologies, which publishes October 3, was inspired by an issue of The Classical Outlook, the nation’s leading scholarly publication for teachers of Latin, Greek, and the ancient Mediterranean world. The journal calls St. Andrew’s its institutional home thanks to Walsh’s appointment in 2023 to a four-year editorship of the publication.

Folded is a collection of poems from 48 poets, paired with each writer’s reflections on the ancient world and its ideas, authors, and places. (Yet another Saint in the mix is poet Chris Childers, former classics instructor and creative writing teacher.) “The book is a work of scholarship as much as it is a work of creative writing,” Walsh says. “This interdisciplinary enterprise—the collection is meditative, intellectual, and philosophical—is very much a piece with what my colleagues and I do at St. Andrew’s.”

Hunter’s illustrations, featured throughout the anthology, are the twin passion of her classics studies and her art major path at St. Andrew’s. “I’m someone who is inspired by the visuals all around me or from reading a passage that’s breathtaking, or even going somewhere and seeing something that’s inspiring,” Hunter said in an interview that is excerpted in Folded. “My first thought is I want to recreate that [moment], and this can be very daunting because it’s hard to reimagine something that’s already beautiful or emotionally stirring. But I want the images that I create to have hidden, mysterious qualities.”

Hunter’s drawings were also inspired by the classics department’s study abroad trip to Greece in spring 2025, where Hunter served as a key senior leader.

“For our work together, I served as editor and Emma as artist, but at a certain point, I became the student and Emma the teacher,” Walsh says. “That was certainly the case when we traveled to Greece. I was proud of her preparation, and how eloquently she spoke [to her peers] about the ancient sites and rituals of prophecy. Her artwork helps me to see and understand deeply the dynamic intersections of past and present, of presence and absence. Her illustrations can be read on multiple levels: accessible to someone familiar with the ancient Mediterranean world, but also inspiring philosophical reflections on beauty, love, loss, grief, and time.”

Navigating the creative process this summer that brought Folded to life—particularly doing so with a former student—spurred in Walsh a revived sense of anticipation for his return to the classroom. “It gave me great joy to see a student develop confidence, commit to craft and process, realize her creative vision, and catch a glimpse of excellence,” Walsh says. “That's my business as an educator, and I can't wait for students to return to campus so that we can begin again.”