Math Meets Poetry to Form Distinctive Senior Project

A liberal arts education from Kalamazoo College gives students a chance to expand their academic interests with great opportunities to turn hobbies into academic involvement. A great instance of that practice is Lizzy Rottenberk ’24, who is double majoring in mathematics and English with a focus on poetry.

In high school, Rottenberk was sure that mathematics was her main academic focus, while she considered poetry to be her hobby. That changed after she took classes through the English department at the end of her first year at K.

“Personally, writing poems has always represented a good way to self-reflect,” Rottenberk said. “It’s a passion that allows me to see how I am feeling and learn more about myself.”

In fact, for her Senior Integrated Project (SIP), she is merging her two passions of math and poetry. Together, they form “Academic Tangents,” where Rottenberk integrates calculus theorems with poetry structures and contexts. The project consists of reflective poems related to academic struggles with five different math concepts represented: functions, limits, derivatives, sequences and series, and anti-derivatives.

All those collections of poems start with a definition of the theorems, followed by a free-verse poem that redefines the theorem in a poetic way. Finally, Rottenberk incorporates poems representing the theorem in the structure and context. The following is an excerpt from a poem titled Connected and Continuous in her SIP:

Editor’s note: This story was written by Blagoja Naskovski ’24. He serves as a social media ambassador for the College Marketing and Communications team. 

Lizzy Rottenberk Abroad
Lizzy Rottenberk ’24 is merging her two passions of math and poetry.

“Connected and Continuous” by Elizabeth Rottenberk

6:00 am
eyes widen
brain begins animation
embarking towards the serene kitchen
breakfast smells of sweet warmth and motivation
pecan almond syrup comforting slightly chewy waffles
leading to a freshly organized backpack filled with unlearned trig
to be explored when the sun peaks above tree lines through a wired window
the window that holds foreheads until listening and comprehension become equal
wielding a pencil like the sword of King Arthur as he is who you traveled to learn about
through the roughest of puddles, more ferocious of red lights but nevertheless, you arrived
to hear the educators chant the literary devices and warn us about math’s greatest complexities
and experience numerous “ah ha’s” that fuel flights into deeper TOK and AOK conversations
until exit from the essential castle known as the education system has been granted
headed home your mind becomes lured into a rooted nap as it shifts to autopilot
the time for learning discontinues as the sun hides behind the tree line
walking under the threshold to the kitchen where delicious
satisfying-smelling food needs your dining
fuel in the vessel that travels distances
to calculate and conquer problems
and write essays in MLA
eyes closed
6:00 am


Rottenberk is active not only in academics, but also in many on-campus and off-campus initiatives. She currently works as a consultant at the Math and Physics Center, where she provides academic peer support to K students for advanced math classes. Moreover, she is the captain for the softball team and president of the Hacky Sack student organization. She is also a First-Year Experience mentor, which allows her to guide students while they adapt to new academic environments.

Off-campus, Rottenberk is part of Sustainable Living Guide, an organization that provides educational support and resources for healthy and sustainable living. Her commitment to this organization includes organizing virtual classes for sustainability, writing for social media and a website, and conducting research on climate action, zero-waste lifestyle and other topics.

“Being proactive makes me feel better and more productive,” Rottenberk said. “While participating in many on-campus initiatives, I feel that that I am not only contributing to my personal and professional growth, but also to my community.”

Rottenberk said K’s liberal arts education has empowered her to push her boundaries while allowing her to apply creative thinking in her academics. Two of her most influential classes at K have been ENG210: Intermediate Poetry Workshop, where she expanded her knowledge of how to write poems, and MATH320: Real Analysis.

“I would encourage students to be independent with established critical thought,” she said. “More importantly, I strongly suggest students utilize every opportunity that K classes offer when it comes to critical thinking.”

Math and poetry expert Elizabeth Rottenberk in a Kalamazoo College softball uniform
Lizzy Rottenberk ’24 is a captain for K’s softball team.

Alumnus Earns NEA Fellowship Through Poetry

Aaron Coleman Poetry Fellowship
Photo by Andrea Bolivar
Poet Aaron Coleman ’09 has earned a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship.

The list of 35 professionals receiving a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Creative Writing Fellowship this year has a distinct Kalamazoo College flavor.

In addition to Department of English Assistant Professor Oliver Baez Bendorf, poet and K alumnus Aaron Coleman ’09 was chosen from more than 1,600 writers for a fellowship worth $25,000.

“It’s something that I’ve dreamed about for a long time because of the folks who have stepped along this path before,” Coleman said, while mentioning writers such as Professor Emeritus Diane Seuss and her mentor, Conrad Hilberry. “I also think of it at the most practical level. I know that this is going to help me create the next book project in ways that I know wouldn’t be possible otherwise.”

Coleman, who soon will earn a Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis, might be known most widely for his 2018 published poetry collection titled Threat Come Close. That collection helped him earn the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for Poetry in 2020. The recognition means Coleman will visit GLCA member institutions, including K this spring, where he will give readings, meet with students and faculty members, and discuss his techniques and creativity in the writing process.

That writing process was greatly inspired by K faculty and the lessons he learned at the College.

“I do know I brought to K the seed kernel that developed into my deep love, appreciation and sort of wonder for the roles that language plays in our lives,” Coleman said. “But during the time I was there, Diane Seuss was really someone who helped me gain confidence and trust that what I had to say was valuable, and that with a lot of work and learning about the tradition of poetry and the technique of revision that I could find a way to write and keep poetry at the center of my life.”

The recognition from the NEA means Coleman will have new opportunities to pursue his own writing, including his next as-of-now untitled project.

“I’m calling my next poetry collection a multi-generational chorus of poems, because of the way that they speak to the lives and experiences of my family over the course of generations, based on both research and family stories,” Coleman said.

The first poem from that collection, titled “Another Strange Land: Downpour off Cape Hatteras (March, 1864),” tells the story of Coleman’s great-great-great-grandfather and is already published on the Academy of American Poets website.

“One of my cousins from Pennsylvania found his tombstone,” Coleman said. “Its engravement said he was a part of the Pennsylvania 25th Colored Infantry, and I realized that he had fought in the Civil War. So that sent me scouring through military records trying to figure out where his unit was at different times, and that kind of blend of imagination and research is at the crux of this next collection.”

Coleman is also currently translating a poetry book titled El Gran Zoo, by Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén. Guillen’s poetry draws on disturbing realities to create a zoo of natural and humanmade wonders alongside a wealth of social and political issues.

In a news release regarding the fellowships, the NEA credits its fellowship honorees as writers who will enrich the world with their artistic contributions for years to come, an idea that helps Coleman feel he’s successful.

“Art and poetry are a unique realm for understanding our emotions and identities,” Coleman said. “It’s a space where we can figure out ways to say things we have no other way to say. Success as a poet, for me, comes from just the investment in the lifelong apprenticeship of writing. It’s in trying to grow as a poet and then seeing that reflected in the world. When people tell me my work matters to them and that it’s valuable to their own journey, that’s what feels like success to me.”

Celebrated Poet Visits, Inspires K

When an award-winning poet speaks on campus, you can bet Kalamazoo College students are eagerly listening and learning.

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
Poet Marcelo Hernandez Castillo reads to Kalamazoo College students from his book, Cenzontle, at the Intercultural Center.

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, a celebrated writer known for his early life experiences as an undocumented immigrant, was warmly welcomed last week to K. He conversed with students in classes taught by Assistant English Professor Shanna Salinas (Reading the World: Identities) and Assistant Sociology Professor Francisco Villegas (Race and Racism). He also provided a poetry reading in front of about 80 students in the Intercultural Center at Hicks Student Center.

“Intersections of language and home are on the hearts and minds of so many of our students,” said Assistant English Professor Oliver Baez Bendorf, who helped facilitate Castillo’s visit. “It’s important for them to know that they can do anything, and to see different models for that. Their stories matter and they can survive the telling of them and even make it beautiful. Reading is always a portal through which they can transport and grow. I know that Marcelo was likewise touched by the energy of our community and our students, their readiness to engage with his writing, their intellectual and creative curiosity, and all that they so impressively juggle.”

Castillo’s poetry collection, titled Cenzontle, addresses the fears he once faced of being deported. Castillo came to the United States with his family from Zacatecas, Mexico, at age 5 and was an early beneficiary of President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Sacramento State University and was the first undocumented student to graduate from the Helen Zell Writers Program at the University of Michigan.

For Cenzontle, the poet received the New Writers Award this year from the Great Lakes Colleges Association — a 13-member consortium of higher-education institutions in Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania — which includes K. The award, founded in 1970, honors writers who are in the early stages of their literary career. Along with Cenzontle, Castillo has a 2018 chapbook titled Dulce. His memoir, Children of the Land, is scheduled for release next year.

Beyond poetry, Castillo is an essayist, translator and immigration advocate and a founding member of the Undocupoets campaign, which successfully eliminated citizenship requirements from all major first-poetry-book prizes in the country. His work has been featured in The New York Times, People Magazine, Buzzfeed and New England Review, and he teaches in the Low-Res MFA program at Ashland University.

With focused eyes and open minds, Salinas’ students listened intently to Castillo and asked a range of questions: poem- and content-specific, craft and poetic technique, themes and broader open-ended considerations. “I appreciated how generous Marcelo was in sharing his personal experiences and talking about his writing process,” Salinas said. “He was invested in their questions and insights, and I could tell the students felt that they were being seen, heard and respected.”

Opportunities to hear from renowned, in-the-field experts are celebrated occasions at K regardless of their field of expertise, although hearing from Castillo was a notable treat for students, faculty and staff, especially the aspiring writers among them.

“So many things about reading and writing happen in solitude,” Baez Bendorf said. “When you’ve read words on a page and then the human behind them arrives in your midst, it can be almost magical. I saw that happen with Marcelo’s visit. It’s thrilling to have a visitor, and even better when they’ve come with stories and generosity. Our students extended great hospitality to Marcelo and welcomed him into their spaces.”

Nature Center Nurtures Student’s Love of Writing

A nature center and biological field station in Hastings, Michigan, is home for a Kalamazoo College student this summer.

Paige Chung and Oliver Baez Bendorf at Pierce Cedar Creek Institute Nature Center
Paige Chung ’20 is at Pierce Cedar Creek Institute this summer, serving as the nature center’s Nature in Words Fellow. Assistant Professor of English Oliver Baez Bendorf, who leads poetry classes at K, is serving Chung as a consultant.

Paige Chung ’20, an English and critical ethnic studies (CES) major, is at Pierce Cedar Creek Institute, which is dedicated to environmental education and stewardship. She is serving the center as a Nature in Words Fellow by developing a collection of soundscape poetry and creative non-fiction based on her on-site explorations.

Soundscapes capture a sound or a combination of sounds that arise from an immersive environment, making Pierce Cedar Creek Institute an ideal atmosphere. The opportunity allows Chung to explore 742 acres of land, including lakes, forests and hiking trails, as she nurtures a hobby she hopes to one day parlay into a career: writing.

Bill and Jessie Pierce developed the Willard G. Pierce and Jessie M. Pierce Foundation to benefit Hastings and West Michigan in 1988. Just before they died in 1998, they had an idea to build an environmental education and nature center that became the Pierce Cedar Creek Institute.

Paige Chung Presenting at Pierce Cedar Creek Institute Nature Center
Paige Chung presents to other fellows at the Pierce Cedar Creek Nature Institute.

Now, 14 students from Michigan colleges and universities are on the property as they study animals from box turtles to rattlesnakes or pursue creative opportunities such as painting. Chung, however, is the only writer, and she feels fortunate to be there.

“I remember getting an email from the English Department about it right before bed one night in February or March,” Chung said. “At that point, I was trying to decide if I should go back home to do some community work for the summer or if I would find somewhere to stay in Michigan, so I applied. It’s phenomenal because it provides me with an abundant number of opportunities to write without the pressures of paying the rent or bills, and it fuels my ability to create my art. It shows me that writing is possible as a career.”

Pierce Cedar Creek Institute fellowship students have consultants of their choosing serving them as advisers during the summer. Chung’s consultant is Assistant Professor of English Oliver Baez Bendorf, who leads poetry classes at K.

Pierce Cedar Creek Institute Nature Center Bridge
Pierce Cedar Creek Institute covers 742 acres of land, including lakes, forests and hiking trails.

“He’s been phenomenal so far with how he pushes me to write,” said Chung, who also credits Intercultural Student Life Director Natalia Carvalho-Pinto, Assistant Professor of Critical Ethnic Studies Reid Gomez and Assistant Professor of English Shanna Salinas for inspiring her at K. Bendorf “encourages me to write and not worry about creating a perfect product. He asks questions and supports me every step of the way. He’s someone I’ll check in with throughout the writing process.”

That process for Chung includes immersing herself at the nature center, both in solitude and in the company of other students, observing and sampling sounds that end up in her poetry. “Poetry for me captures a moment,” Chung said. “There’s less pressure to have an entire plot and story line with poetry. It’s a playground for language. I also like to write plays, but those are longer-term projects for me. With poetry, I can write in one day and be done with it. I don’t necessarily need anything more than time, a piece of paper and a pen.”

At K, Chung works as a Writing Center assistant director and Intercultural Center-Arcus Center liaison, and she co-founded Resist, Magic Mastermind, a zine publication uplifting the stories of queer students, trans students and students of color. As a Los Angeles native, Chung’s inspirations have traditionally been city based, which means Pierce Cedar Creek Institute expands her writing horizons.

Chung said, “In CES, we learn from Chinua Achebe—who speaks English as a non-native speaker, allowing for something new and interesting to happen with language—that stories are stories even with a non-native tongue. We learn from the book Almanac of the Dead that stories are power. Through the power of language and stories, I am constantly asking what can be done with writing.”

This fellowship gives Chung the opportunity to explore this question in new ways.

“Through this fellowship, I ask what can be translated from the sounds of nature to sounds from hip-hop, jazz, Spanglish, Vietnamese and Los Angeles. This will help me push the boundaries of my poetry and writing to new landscapes.”

Get Versed in National Poetry Month

If your knowledge of poetry is limited, April is the perfect time to expand your horizons and practice your writing. That’s because it’s National Poetry Month, and Assistant English Professor Oliver Baez Bendorf has creatively developed ways for students to hone their skills and develop their interests in poetry to celebrate.

Kayla Park National Poetry Month
Kayla Park read at the Belladonna* Collaborative Reading last spring. She interned with Belladonna*, an independent feminist avant-garde poetry press, through the New York Arts Program during the winter 2018 term at K.

Among his classes, Baez Bendorf teaches an advanced poetry workshop, which is participating in a 21-day challenge to write every day. Students are assigned poetry-inspired aliases and write about their praxis, or practice, of writing. “Writing about writing” might sound redundant, but its purpose is to help students learn about themselves, their influences and their processes to discover what inspires them.

Audrey Honig ’21, for example, is an English and religion major with a concentration in Jewish studies from Elmhurst, Illinois. She is writing erasure poems under the alias Lyra based on what she sees through social media. Erasure poetry erases words from an existing text in prose or verse and frames the result as a poem. The results can be allowed to stand on their own or arranged into lines or stanzas.

“I thought it would be interesting to bring what normally is a distraction into my writing,” said Honig, of the social media she analyzes. “I thought I wrote a lot before this class started, but I really wasn’t creating much. I was working on my writing, but I was mostly working on the editing process. Now I’m doing something small every day.”

Her biggest takeaway from the course has been how to better give and receive feedback to classmates and other writers.

“As students, we’re used to getting feedback when a professor might say, ‘This is a B,’” she said. “In this class, we’re really thinking about the specifics of what we’re doing as writers, so we can give honest and helpful feedback without tearing anyone down.”

For her 21-day challenge, Kayla Park ’19 selects a book at random off her shelf every day and writes a poem inspired by the last sentence on page 21 in that book.

Audrey Honig Recites During National Poetry Month
Audrey Honig presents during a class at Kalamazoo College’s Humphrey House. Honig is is writing erasure poems under the alias Lyra based on what she sees through social media.

Park, who writes under the alias Pegasus, earned a Heyl Scholarship when she matriculated at K to study within a science major, and she double majors in English and physics. She said she can see how a writing genre such as poetry helps make her a better scientist.

“When you continue doing a lot of work in one field and you get used to a certain mode of thinking, that’s beneficial in making you an expert in your subject, although you can also restrict your thought patterns that way,” she said. “In poetry, I’m expressing knowledge under a set of conventions that is different, but no less valuable than in science. Engaging with different modes of thinking helps me to see connections across disciplines and approach all situations from a broader point of view.”

The creativity poetry stirs for Park complements what she does with two a cappella groups at K, Premium Orange and A Cappella People of Color (ACAPOC), as well as with Frelon, the campus’ student dance company. It also helps her deal with her own perfectionism.

“Sometimes when I sit down to write, regardless of the assignment, I get hung up on making it perfect,” she said. “Forcing myself to write every day is beneficial in letting a little of that perfectionism go. It helps me write more freely and produce something that I can always go back and edit later.”

Baez Bendorf also offers an intermediate poetry workshop. That class this month is memorizing poems such as Truth Serum and 300 Goats by Naomi Shihab Nye and To Myself by Franz Wright with the goal of reciting them in May.

“We approach it as a kind of ultimate close reading of the work, and then aim to know it by heart, hopefully for a lifetime,” Baez Bendorf said.

National Poetry Month was inaugurated by the Academy of American Poets in 1996. It since has become the largest literary celebration in the world with schools, publishers, libraries, booksellers and poets celebrating poetry, according to the American Academy of Poetry.

The organization drew inspiration for National Poetry Month from Black History Month in February and Women’s History Month in March, and it aims to highlight the legacies and ongoing achievements of American poets, encourage the public to read poems, and increase the number of poetry-themed stories in local and national media. Read more about National Poetry Month at the Academy of American Poets’ website.

“backyard song”

K Professor Di Seuss ArticleWriter in Residence Diane Seuss has published a poem, “backyard song,” in the February issue of Poetry Magazine. Di’s poem is part of a group of a recently devised poetic form known as the Golden Shovel, an homage to the poet Gwendolyn Brooks, who would be 100 years old this year. The last words of each line in a Golden Shovel poem are, in order, words from a line or lines taken often, but no invariably, from a Brooks poem.

Di’s poem is a riff on Brook’s “a song in the front yard.” Here’s a taste of Di’s Golden Shovel poem:

Uncorked, I had a thought: I
want the want
I dreamed of wanting once, a
quarter cup of sneak-peek
at what prowls in the back, at
what sings in the
wet rag space behind the garage, back

where the rabbits nest, where
I smell something soupish, sour and dank and it’s
filled with weeks like rough
cat tongues and
the wind is unfostered, untended,
now that it’s just me here and
I am so hungry
for the song that grows tall like a weed
grows, and grows.

But you should swallow it whole: page 452 in the February issue of Poetry. Di is one of several impressive poets in the Golden Shovel group, which includes the late Philip Levine, Sharon Olds, Rita Dove, Alberto Rios and Danez Smith, who read some of his poems on campus this past Monday at the Martin Luther King, Jr. convocation. Di’s most recent collection of poems, Four-Legged Girl, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her next book, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, will come out in 2018.

Beloved English Professor and Poet Dies

Conrad HillberryIn a speech he gave in 1987, Professor Emeritus of English Conrad Hilberry said, “When I think of poems that I am especially drawn to, I find they often have a silence, a mystery at the center.”

Today Con is that silence, a life now part of a “mystery at the center” into which words will penetrate insufficiently at best, the way sunlight beneath the surface of a deep ocean shimmers a few meters at most then disappears.

Con died on January 11, 2017. Several weeks previous, his daughter, Jane, wrote that her father had written to her that he planned to “make his exit” after Christmas but wasn’t sure he could endure that long. He endured and then died from complications of cancer and pneumonia. He was 88 years old. A campus memorial service for Con will occur on Saturday, February 4, at 1 p.m. in Stetson Chapel. A reception will follow in the lobby of the Light Fine Arts Building. Memorial donations may be made to The Katharine Hilberry Scholarship Fund at Kalamazoo College.

Con earned his B.A. at Oberlin College, his M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin. Attracted to “the promise of a college that was willing to try things,” Con was recruited to Kalamazoo College by Larry Barrett, a colleague in the English department and later a dear friend. Con started his career at K in 1962, the first full year of the bold and quirky curriculum called the K-Plan. He retired in 1998. In between, countless students of all majors and liberal arts inclinations fondly recall his literature and writing classes and especially his poetry courses. He wrote 11 volumes of poetry. His latest, Until the Full Moon Has Its Say, he wrote in his mid-eighties, and many of its poems are villanelles, a demanding form Con seemed to execute with ease. Like his friend and colleague Larry Barrett, whom he eulogized in 2002, Con was “in business right to the end.”

His prolificity as a poet sometimes obscured the fact that he was a marvelous writer of prose, author of the genre-bending creative nonfiction piece, Luke Karamazov, and countless essays and chapel talks, often on poets such as John Donne and Galway Kinnell, two he particularly loved, though there are many many more. Con loved to illustrate with poems the ideas he articulated in his prose as if to remind us that poetry (as he once said) can be a brief and invigorating elevation from the “lowly ground” of our inward selves–not that such ground is bereft of beauty and mystery, only that our souls seek a glimpse of something abundant beyond our own inwardness. Con often found that abundance, “a pool of meaning,” in the ordinary.

He was a remarkable teacher, entirely and joyfully at home in the “arches and vaults” of the liberal arts, created when the seemingly separate disciplines lean together and conjoin. He continually sought inspiration for his own work (both his teaching and his poetry) in the subject matters of his colleagues and friends–biology, mathematics, religion, philosophy, physics and psychology to name just a few. Often he’d audit courses in different departments as grist for his imagination, for example John Spencer’s seminar on Alfred North Whitehead and David Evans’s class on ethology. What he learned in those classes found its way into his poems, intentionally or not. Most of all he loved K students, and the effect on them of the K-Plan: their genius, he wrote, “for combining academic work and off-campus experience in just the way to allow themselves the most dramatic growth.”

In 1995, three years before his retirement, he began teaching night classes in poetry at the Stryker Center. These he continued for some 15 years, and many of his ex-students and members of the greater Kalamazoo community attended. Con helped poets make and publish their poems, and the list of these writers is impressive, including, among others, Susan Blackwell Ramsey, Corey Marks, Gail McMurray Martin, Marie Bahlke, Kit Almy, Gail Griffin, Rob Dunn, Hedy Habra, Marion Boyer, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Jane Hilberry, Amy Newday, and his lifelong student and friend, Pulitzer Prize finalist Diane Seuss. His beloved wife of 60 years, Marion, who died on April 8, 2008, often joined him in these classes.

In an essay he wrote on Galway Kinnell, Con described the opposition between poems and the notion of the final word. Comments on poems we perceive as “right on certain points and wrong on others,” he said. “But no one sees [those comments, even if they are the author’s] as the last word, equivalent to the poem itself. We always assume there is more to be said as the complexities of the poem take different configurations from other readers….Whenever a reading is taken as final, the poem is diminished.”

He managed his classes like that, starting things off, then sitting back to listen and provide space for students’ voices–for that peculiar confluence of text and the texture of readers’ lives, from which arises meaning. “I just need to choose the right books,” he once said. “Then the students notice things about the poems, and they teach each other.”

He was a poet and teacher of the people, deeply involved in the city of Kalamazoo’s Poetry on Buses program during its heyday. Often, with fellow poets (and friends) Herb Scott and John Woods (English professors at neighboring Western Michigan University) among others, Con would bring poetry into public middle schools, somehow managing to engage that always potentially intractable audience into the “best poems,” which Con considered an ineffable harmony of vividness (which the junior high students loved) and wholeness (where, often, the work began). He served as an editor of the Third Coast anthologies of Michigan poets and seemed to be a friend to every writer therein.

In his teaching prime Con’s presence was unforgettable, especially his red hair and ready smile. His limp and the rattle of his bike always suggested some past accident that had had no effect on his love of biking steep grades, celebrating gravity. And why not celebrate the force that holds us in what he called our “borrowed dust” for our short while on earth–the best, the only place for love.

In his last chapel talk (2001), using a line from a poem by Stanley Kunitz, Con said, “I have walked through many lives, some of them my own.” Indeed, Con contained multitudes.

Near the end, when Con was in the hospital, before he came home for hospice care, he said to his daughter, Jane, “I still have some talents left.  One of them is sleeping.  Another one is laughing.”

So like Con: able to sort by scent the smoke of sleep and laughter. He was, to the very end, the poet of the ordinary’s miracle.

MLK and “Our Moment”

Danez Smith
Danez Smith

What does the annual celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.–his achievements and his ideas–mean for the present moment, what K students’ might term “our moment?” How should his spirit apply–in imagination, in word, in action–to their now and their future?

These are questions posed by and to students by and to the College’s Intercultural Center. The answers to those questions (both continually developing) will inform Kalamazoo College’s 2017 Martin Luther King Jr. Convocation on January 16, 2017.

As in the past, K’s activities will be part of various city events on that day. The 2017 MLK celebration Kalamazoo-wide theme is “The Transformative Power of a Unified Dream.”

Director of Intercultural Student Life (ISL) Natalia Carvalho-Pinto and students worked together to shape a celebration that creates opportunities to “consider what transformative power and resistance mean for new generations,” says Carvalho-Pinto. The ISL theme for this year’s K events is “Transformative Power and Resistance in the New Century: What Does ‘The Dream’ Look like Today?”

The day will feature four events, beginning with a convocation address by poet Danez Smith (10:50 a.m. in Stetson Chapel). The title of his talk is the same as the theme for K’s events, and it is free and open to the public.

Smith is the award-winning author of [insert] Boy (YesYes Books, 2014) and hands on ya knees (Penmanship Books, 2013), and he is a founding member of the multi-genre, multicultural Dark Noise Collective. His writing has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Kinfolks, among others.

His poems focus on intersecting matters of race, class, sexuality, faith and social justice, and it is characterized by a power, rhythm and imagery that invites and demands a reimagining of the world.

Smith then will lead a poetry workshop (12:30 p.m. Hicks Banquet Room, lunch provided) that is open to K students only. The workshop–titled “Future Tense: Poetry as Blueprint”–will explore the use of poetry to imagine realistic utopias in the not so distant future, and how those futures can allow us to reverse engineer the steps we would need to take to make them. “By looking at speculative worlds of some of today’s young poets of color,” says Carvalho-Pinto, “the workshop will inspire us toward change, possibility, action, dreaming and building the worlds we deserve.”

At 4 p.m. (gathering at Red Square) K students, faculty and staff will join their counterparts from Western Michigan University to walk to Martin Luther King Jr. Park in downtown Kalamazoo. Transportation back to K’s campus will be provided.

The afternoon’s poetry workshop will culminate at 6:30 p.m. with a reading in the Intercultural Center (Hicks). Students will share relevant writings and reflections–their own and that of others, some perhaps written that day during the workshop–about the day’s theme and celebrations. “The potential power of this event is extraordinary,” says Carvalho-Pinto. “We did this at Ferris [State University], and it was one of my favorite events.” The reading is open to the entire Kalamazoo College community, as is the film that will follow at 7:30 p.m. ISL has tentatively scheduled a screening of The Rosa Parks Story (starring Angela Bassett).

“We’re very excited about this year’s events,” says Carvalho-Pinto, “especially their potential to get us thinking about how what we celebrate on this day should infuse our present and future. And I’m particularly thrilled that Danez Smith will be a part.”

***
if you press your ear to the dirt
you can hear it hum, not like it’s filled

with beetles & other low gods
but like a mouth rot with gospel

& other glories. listen to the dirt
crescendo a boy back.

come. celebrate. this
is everyday. every day

holy. everyday high
holiday. everyday new

year. every year, days get longer.
time clogged with boys. the boys

O the boys. they still come
in droves. the old world

keeps choking them. our new one
can’t stop spitting them out.

-from “summer, somewhere,” by Danez Smith, Poetry, January 2016

Professor Lance, an Honored Writer, Dies at 93

Betty LanceBetty Rita Gómez Lance, professor emeritus of Romance languages and literatures, died on September 18, 2016. She was 93. Her career at Kalamazoo College spanned 27 years (1961-1988). Before coming to K she taught at Washington University in St. Louis and at the University of Illinois.

Betty was born in San Jose, Costa Rica. Her father had migrated to that country from Spain. In Costa Rica he worked as a shoemaker to support his wife and their four daughters. Betty’s mother was the staunch advocate of education for her four daughters. Betty came to the United States in 1942 to study science and earned her bachelor’s degree (physical sciences) at Central Missouri State University and her master’s degree (agricultural chemistry) at the University of Missouri. But literature was her great passion, and she earned her Ph.D. in Romance languages and literatures at Washington University in St. Louis. Betty was fluent in Spanish and English and proficient in French, Italian, Portuguese, and German. She loved her native country and believed that Costa Rica’s commitment to democracy and freedom to dissent had much to teach the world.

In addition to her teaching duties at K, Betty directed Puerta de Oportunidad, a project to teach English as a foreign language to Spanish speaking people in the Kalamazoo area. She was a prolific scholar, whose works include a book on Spanish novelist Juan Antonio de Zunzunegui. She also authored books on Peruvian writer Enrique Lopez Albujar and El Salvador poet Claudia Lars, and she published a work of literary criticism on the picaresque tradition in the 20th-century literature of Spain.

Betty was a short story writer and poet. Her volumes of poetry include Vivencias (Lifeways), Vendimia del Tiempo (Harvest of Time), Alas en el Alba (Wings in the Dawn), Bebiendo Luna (Sipping Moon), and Siete Cuerdas (Seven Chords). Her short story collection was titled Hoy Hacen Corro Las Ardillas (Today the Squirrels are Holding a Pow-Wow). She also published poems and stories in many Spanish-English literary journals. She had a style of concrete imagery often drawn from nature and a writing regimen reminiscent of the late U.S. Poet Laureate William Stafford, making poems every day, or, in Betty’s case, every night. “I work on images [and] it is night when I write poetry,” she said. “Sometimes they come and come and come. I’ll do three to five poems.” In 1993 Betty was inducted into the Academia Iberoamericana de Poesía de Madrid (Iberoamerican Academy of Poetry), whose honorees also include Nobel Laureates Vicente Alexandre and Pablo Neruda. Betty had previously been inducted into the Asociación Prometeo de Poesía (The Prometheus Association of Poetry) in Madrid, Spain.

Betty was active in many organizations, including Friends of the Library, the Kalamazoo Institute Arts, the Kalamazoo Nature Center, and the Environmental Concerns Committee in Kalamazoo. She was a member of Poets and Writers America, American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese, the Asociación De Escritores Costarricenses, the aforementioned Asociación Prometeo De Poesía and Asociación Iberoamericana De Poesía, and many others.

In addition to writing, Betty loved to hike and knit. After her retirement she established an award in Latin American Studies that had been awarded anonymously until her passing.  The fund now bears her name The Betty R. Gomez Lance Award in Latin American Studies. She is survived by two sons, Edward (a graduate of K) and Harold, and the many students (surrogate “sons” and “daughters” in a way) whom she inspired to become teachers of Spanish and Latin American and Spanish literatures. A campus memorial service is being planned for December. More information on the service will be forthcoming.

“I write to give vent to my joys, my sorrows, my feelings, my thoughts,” she once wrote. “I write for personal solace; and when I receive praise for my writings that connection to another soul, the vivencias of another human being, surprises me. It is very comforting to know that they too have these feelings and that we’re all part of the universal human soul.”

K Professor Receives Lucasse Fellowship

Kalamazoo College Professor Di SeussKalamazoo College announced today that Writer in Residence and Assistant Professor of English Diane Seuss ’78 will receive the 2017 Florence J. Lucasse Fellowship for Excellence in Scholarship. It is the highest award bestowed by the Kalamazoo College faculty, and it honors the recipient’s contributions in creative work, research and publication. Seuss is the 28th person in the College’s history to receive the award.

Seuss was named one of two finalists for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, a first in the history of Kalamazoo College. She is the author of three volumes of poetry, most recently Four Legged Girl, and she has a fourth book of poems forthcoming from Graywolf Press. She is every bit as remarkable a teacher as she is a writer. She is a previous recipient of the Florence J. Lucasse Lectureship for Excellence in Teaching, and many of her students have been accepted into the most prestigious M.F.A. programs in the country. Poetry, she says, holds space for everybody. A ceremony to confer the fellowship for excellence in scholarship and creative work will occur in spring term, and at that event Di will give a presentation, more than likely a delightful hybrid of poetry, story and lecture. The author of this article can hardly wait.