She was included in the Who's Who of African American Writers because of her candid comments on racial tension in the United States, perhaps inspired by her own low socio-economic background.
Her poetry from the 1930s was discussed by James Edward Smethurst in The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African-American Poetry, 1930–1946, together with that of Lucy Mae Turner, Frank Marshall Davis, Waring Cuney, Richard Wright and Countée Cullen.
[2] Smethurst notes that Gerding Athens appeared to be separated from the mainstream of left-wing African-American literature yet "manifested important thematic and formal concerns" in her poetry that he considers characteristic of 1930s–40s African-American poetry.
[3] She was supposedly influential in choosing the geranium as Ohio's state flower.
[citation needed] She married William Wilson Athens II on December 23, 1917, as his second wife.