A memorial service celebrating the life Charles True Goodsell Sr. has been arranged by his son, Charles T. Goodsell Jr., a member of the Kalamazoo College Class of 1954. The event will occur on Saturday, May 11, at 11 A.M. in the Blacksburg (Virginia) Presbyterian Church (701 Church Street). The senior Goodsell was a professor in the K history department from 1928 until his sudden death while speaking in Stetson Chapel on November 25, 1951. Goodsell also served as the acting president of Kalamazoo College in 1935-36. Stories will be told by his son prior to the placement of his ashes in the Church Columbarium. (The ashes were discovered unclaimed at Langeland Funeral Home in Kalamazoo last November.) A lunch will follow the memorial service. Charles Jr. sent word of the service because some alumni who knew his father may still be alive and interested in knowing about the event. All are invited to the service. Persons interested in joining the family for lunch should RSVP at 540.552.9032 or goodsell@vt.edu.
faculty
K Professor Takes Second Place in Fiction Contest
Professor of English Andy Mozina took second place in the fiction category of the Summer Literary Seminars Unified Literary Contest. There were some 1,200 entrants in the contest. The fiction category as judged by Mary Gaitskill. Mozina’s fine finish continues a K tradition: Last year Writer-in-Residence Di Seuss ’84 won first place in the contest’s poetry category. For Mozina, the prize includes publication and free tuition for a two-week conference in either Lithuania or Kenya.
Improv Festival in Downtown Kalamazoo
Professor of Theatre Arts Ed Menta, who also directs Festival Playhouse of Kalamazoo College, gives a shout-out to the 5th Annual Kalamazoo Improv Festival. Festival activities take place on May 10 and 11. Friday, May 10, features four shows (6PM, 8PM, 10PM, and 11:30 PM). Saturday offers two workshops (1PM and 4PM) and two shows (8PM and 10PM). All shows and workshops will be at Farmers Alley Theatre. More information and ticket reservation are available online, for call the Farmers Alley box office at 269.343.2727.
K Team Presents at Food Justice Meeting
A Kalamazoo College (and Kalamazoo-area) food justice partnership coordinated by the Mary Jane Underwood Stryker Center for Civic Engagement (formerly the Institute for Service-Learning) came together as a plenary session team and presented at Michigan State University’s First Annual Workshop on Food Justice & Peace. Team members included Alison Geist, director of the Center for Civic Engagement; Associate Professor of English Amelia Katanski; K students Shoshana Schultz ’13 and Charlotte Steele ’14; Ben Brown of the People’s Food Co-op; and Guillermo Martinez of the Van Buren Intermediate School District. Martinez also works with the College’s Hispanic Health and Disease class (Spanish 205). Steele is a former Civic Engagement Scholar of the organization Farms to K. Most of the MSU conference presenters discussed theoretical aspects of food justice and peace. The K team discussed how theory has translated into action in the Kalamazoo area. According to Schultz, the K team demonstrated the “ecology of food justice work in Kalamazoo,” how the parts work together in a manner that integrates theory and practice. Said Schultz: “People were blown away and very impressed by the collaboration that takes place in Kalamazoo.
Kalamazoo College Announces Finalists for $25,000 Global Prize for Collaborative Social Justice Leadership
Kalamazoo College is pleased to announce the finalists for its inaugural $25,000 Global Prize for Collaborative Social Justice Leadership.
Fifteen finalist projects are collaboratively led by scholars and activists from eight U.S. cities (Columbus, Ohio; Detroit; Los Angeles; New York; Oakland, Cal.; Olympia, Wash.; South Bend, Ind.; and Urbana, Ill.; and ten nations including Germany, Honduras, Hungary, India, Malawi, Palestine, Rwanda, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. One of these projects will earn the $25,000 Global Prize.
Three finalists—two from Kalamazoo and one from Marshall—are eligible for a $5,000 Regional Prize for a project that originates in Southwest Michigan.
All finalists will present their work May 9-11 in Dalton Theatre on the K campus to jurors and attendees who will discuss and deliberate over the course of a three-day “Prize Weekend.” Global and Regional Prize winners will be announced by Kalamazoo College President Eileen Wilson-Oyelaran, on Saturday, May 11 at 7:15 in Dalton.
“The Kalamazoo College Global Prize creates an opportunity for our students, faculty, and the local community to interact with scholars and activists who are at the leading edge of collaborative social justice leadership practices around the country and around the world,” Wilson-Oyelaran said.
“The Global Prize also matches up with K’s mission to prepare its graduates to better understand, live successfully within, and provide enlightened leadership to a richly diverse and increasingly complex world,” she said.
Visit https://reason.kzoo.edu/csjl/clprize/finalists to see a brief description of each finalist and link to its video entry. Facebook users may also view each video and “Like” their favorites ).
Each Global Prize applicant submitted a video (8-10 minutes) describing a social justice project, its innovative approach, and its collaborative leadership structure. A total of 188 entries were received from 23 countries and 25 U.S. states (including 14 from Southwest Michigan) by the March 8 deadline.
“The Global Prize undertaking truly presents an excellent opportunity for K students and the entire community to see social justice theory in action and to reflect on what we see as promising practices in the pursuit of a more just world,” said Lisa Brock, academic director of Kalamazoo College’s Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership, which is administering the Global Prize competition.
According to Brock, a wide variety of social justice issues are addressed among the finalists, including: education access and equity, environmental sustainability, food sovereignty, health inequities, human rights violations against prisoners and LGBTQI people, immigration, international development, racism, workers’ rights, and more.
“Several finalists involve projects and partners that cross state and international borders,” Brock said. “One project from India, for example, includes partners in Columbus, Ohio and South Bend, Indiana. And the project from South Africa includes collaborators in Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.”
More than 50 people, including K students, faculty, and staff members, as well as social justice advocates in Kalamazoo and elsewhere, juried the semifinal round of the competition and selected the 18 finalists. Jurors included: author, political activist, and University of California-Santa Cruz scholar Angela Y. Davis; former Executive Director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission Cary Alan Johnson; and shea howell, Detroit-based author, educator, columnist, and board member of the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership.
The Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership was launched in 2009 with support from the Arcus Foundation (www.arcusfoundation.org), including a $23 million endowment grant in January 2012. Supporting Kalamazoo College’s mission to prepare its graduates to better understand, live successfully within, and provide enlightened leadership to a richly diverse and increasingly complex world, the ACSJL will develop new leaders and sustain existing leaders in the field of human rights and social justice.
Kalamazoo College (www.kzoo.edu), founded in Kalamazoo, Mich., in 1833, is a nationally recognized liberal arts college and the creator of the K-Plan that emphasizes rigorous scholarship, experiential learning, leadership development, and international and intercultural engagement. Kalamazoo College does more in four years so students can do more in a lifetime.
K’s David Barclay is a Peripatetic Scholar
In recent months David Barclay (Margaret and Roger Scholten Professor of International Studies, Department of History) has made a variety of presentations in several different venues. In November 2012 he spoke on “Music and Cold War Politics in West Berlin” at the Max Kade Center for German and European Studies at Vanderbilt University (Nashville, Tennessee). While at Vanderbilt Barclay was able to talk with Professor Edward Friedman, one of the world’s most distinguished Cervantes scholars, who taught at K in the 1970s. He also talked with Peter Collins, son of the late Professor David Collins, who taught French at K for many years. Later that month Barclay presented a paper on “Preussen in amerikanischer und europaeischer Sicht” (“European and American Views of Prussia”) at a conference of the Otto von Bismarck Foundation in Potsdam, Germany. In February 2013, in Fort Worth, Texas, he delivered a banquet address on “Myth, Memory, and the Legacies of 1813” at the 42nd annual conference of the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era. In early May he will address the Southwest Michigan Association of Phi Beta Kappa by asking “’Why on Earth Do You Study German History?’ How I Try to Answer That Question.” Barclay also recently signed a contract with Princeton University Press to publish his next book, Cold War City: West Berlin 1948-1994, in 2017.
Barclay recently published an article (“A ’Complicated Contrivance’: West Berlin behind the Wall, 1971-1989”) in a volume titled Walls, Borders, Boundaries: Spatial and Cultural Practices in Europe edited by Marc Silberman, Karen Till, and Janet Ward. It’s just been reviewed in the journal Society and Space — Environment and Planning. The reviewer wrote: “In chapter 6 (’A complicated contrivance’) David Barclay draws together Berlin’s material histories with its alternative aesthetic potentialities. His account revisits Berlin behind the wall as a site of drama and epic personalities–the epicentre of the Cold War–together with the gradual demographic hollowing and cultures of experimentation fostered by the Allied occupation. The ‘oddly dialectical relationship’ between the Allies’ presence and the emergent, ’curious’ socio-political cultures of West Berlin (page 125) hinge upon the immense shadow of the Wall, which, all the same, formed an increasingly invisible backdrop like another ’piece of furniture’ (page 122). Perhaps more than any other chapter Barclay’s essay illuminates how the maintenance of ordinary life can have enduring and unpredictable effects. Against the backdrop of the wall, politically alternative cultures have survived in Berlin like perhaps nowhere else in Europe. These include new kinds of tactical subversion such as squatting and anarchist direct action. Subversion and the reproduction of walls are shown to inflect one another.”
Sabbatical Attraction
The root of the word sabbatical is “rest,” but Jan Tobochnik, physics and computer science, was in great demand as a lecturer during his sabbatical (June 2012 to March 2013). He gave five invited talks while on sabbatical. Three of the talks were titled “Network Analysis of Patent Citations,” and were based on work he did with fellow Kalamazoo College professor, Peter Erdi, physics and psychology, and others. These talks were given at Clark University, the Boston University Center for Computational Science, and the Northeastern University Center for Complex Networks Research. In addition, Tobochnik gave two talks titled “Physical Insight from Computational Algorithms,” at Universidad de Murcia in Murcia, Spain, and the University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth.
Kalamazoo Poets
If you like poetry and you like Michigan, check out a recent post (Awesome Mitten, Michigan Books Project) that includes a short review of four books of poetry, each with strong Michigan connections. The first of the four reviewed is Writer-in-Residence Di Seuss’s award-winning Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open. Other poets featured are John Rybicki, Laura Kasischke, and Jared Randall. Rybicki and Kasischke have done poetry readings on campus.
And in other news of Kalamazoo poets, Gail Griffin, the Ann V. and Donald R. Parfet Professor of English, won the annual poetry contest sponsored by FOLIO, a literary magazine published by American University (Washington, D.C.) Gail’s submission was her first ever “glosa,” a Spanish form of four 10-line stanzas based on a quatrain from another poem. Gail wrote, “I took some lines from a news story that particularly disturbed me and broke them into four lines of poetry. I’ve been working for a few years on poems and short prose inspired by weird, funny, or otherwise outrageous news stories.”
The contest judge was Martha Collins, a widely published poet who is affiliated with Oberlin College. Collins wrote, “I greatly admire the way [Griffin’s] ’Glosa: Man Held in Burning of Homeless Woman in Los Angeles’ moves through time, going back to Adam and forward to a ’millennium hence’ to elucidate a bit of news. The glosa form and a Genesis-inspired movement through the week are among the poetic strategies the author uses to create a richly-collaged reflection on the (gendered) need ’to love and loathe,’ as well as more generally disturbing aspects of our contemporary society.”
We look forward to sharing Gail’s poem when it is published in FOLIO later this year.
Kalamazoo College Raises Curtain on 50th Anniversary of Festival Playhouse
Kalamazoo College lifts the curtain early for the 50th anniversary season of its celebrated Festival Playhouse theatre arts program. Although the anniversary takes place during the 2013-14 academic year, the celebration begins May 16-19 with the staging of Into the Woods, the groundbreaking musical by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, produced in collaboration with the K Department of Music.
“Our history is so rich and our celebration events so numerous, we had to start this spring in order to do it justice,” said longtime Professor of Theatre Arts and Festival Playhouse Director Ed Menta, who will stage the show. “And we are thrilled to start the celebration with Sondheim’s masterpiece.”
Into the Woods will be performed in the Nelda K. Balch Playhouse on Thursday May 16 at 7:30 p.m., Friday May 17 and Saturday May 18 at 8:00 p.m., and Sunday May 19 at 2:00 p.m. Tickets are $15/Adults, $10/seniors and $5/students.
Professors of Music Tom Evans and James Turner will serve as musical and vocal directors, respectively.
This Tony, Drama Critics Circle, and Drama Desk Award winning show “helped change the ‘American Musical,’” Evans said. “Sondheim shows are special. They combine in the most masterful way, music, lyrics, and plot. Perhaps what I like most about his work is his ability to create multilevel meanings simultaneously.”
Into the Woods features memorable songs such as “Giants in the Sky,” “Agony,” and “Children Will Listen” sung by iconic characters such as Jack (of Beanstalk fame), Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, and Cinderella.
“And it puts a contemporary twist on the timeworn fairy tale ending,” Menta said, “What happens the day after they all lived happily ever after?”
Kalamazoo College Professor of Theatre Arts Nelda K. Balch established the first season of Festival Playhouse—with generous support from the Dorothy U. Dalton Foundation—in 1963-64, with a schedule of groundbreaking modern dramas such as Max Frisch’s The Firebugs, Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, and a revival of Balch’s own 1958 production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (the first time a college in the United States had produced this landmark Absurdist play).
Beginning this spring and running through the 2013-14 season, the College will celebrate and renew the original goals and spirit of Festival Playhouse with events that include: the grand re-opening of the Nelda K. Balch Playhouse; the return of internationally known performance artist and K alumna Holly Hughes ’77; “An Evening of Kalamazoo College Theatre Alumni Scenes;” a season of three classics of Modern Drama, including Strindberg, Ibsen, and a restaging of a rarely produced early Absurdist comedy from the original Festival Playhouse season staged by professional director and K alumna Nora Hauk ’04; a special “Talkback” series led by K theatre alumni; and much more.
“From the beginning, Festival Playhouse sought to produce provocative and thoughtful theatre by combining the talents of K students, members of the greater Kalamazoo community, and professional artists,” said Ed Menta.
“The 50th anniversary season will live up to that standard.”
Dates, locations, and more details about the 50th anniversary season of Festival Playhouse at Kalamazoo College can be found by visiting www.kzoo.edu/theatre.
Kalamazoo College (www.kzoo.edu), founded in Kalamazoo, Mich., in 1833, is a nationally recognized liberal arts college and the creator of the K-Plan that emphasizes rigorous scholarship, experiential learning, leadership development, and international and intercultural engagement. Kalamazoo College does more in four years so students can do more in a lifetime.
Mill Art Features K Professor
Associate Professor of Art Sarah Lindley has an exhibition with her husband, Norwood Viviano, opening this month at Western Michigan University’s Richmond Center for Visual Arts. The show, set for April 25 to May 23, will explore the way industry affects communities and the environment.
Lindley’s sculptures, made from clay and handmade paper, deal with abandoned paper mills in Allegan County and their impact on the Kalamazoo River. She and Viviano became interested in the mills after moving to Plainwell, where they have a home studio. Viviano commutes from there to his job as an associate professor of art and design at Grand Valley State University, in the Grand Rapids area.
Viviano will display glass sculptures modeled after abandoned Detroit factories and their surrounding landscapes and may exhibit drawings from a piece in last year’s Art Prize competition in Grand Rapids. The two artists also plan to exhibit at least one collaborative piece that was in the 2011 Art Prize contest.
Richmond Center gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday to Thursday, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday and noon to 6 p.m. Saturday in April and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday to Friday in May.
Works for the exhibition were created with support from the Arts Council of Greater Kalamazoo KADI grant, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Directions Grant, the John Michael Kohler Center Arts-Industry program and/or the Peter S. Reed Foundation.