All Kalamazoo College alumni are invited to join us for the
Austin Regional Alumni Dinner with President Jorge G. Gonzalez.
Thursday, January 9
Dinner 6-7:30 p.m.
Ember Kitchen
800 W. Cesar Chavez Street, Suite PP110
Austin, TX
Space is limited!
Please register by Thursday, January 2 | Questions? Contact alumni@kzoo.edu or 269.337.7283
All Kalamazoo College alumni, parents and friends are invited
to join us for the Washington DC Regional Alumni Event with President Jorge G. Gonzalez.
Wednesday, February 5
Reception 6:30-8 p.m.
The Royal Sonesta Washington DC Dupont Circle
2121 P Street NW
Washington, DC
Please register by Wednesday, January 29 | Questions? Contact alumni@kzoo.edu or 269.337.7283
All Kalamazoo College alumni, parents and friends are invited
to join us for the Sarasota Regional Alumni Event with President Jorge G. Gonzalez.
Thursday, February 20
Reception 6:30-8 p.m.
The Ritz-Carlton, Sarasota
1111 Ritz-Carlton Drive
Sarasota, FL
Please register by Friday, February 14 | Questions? Contact alumni@kzoo.edu or 269.337.7283
All Kalamazoo College alumni, parents and friends are invited
to join us for the Denver Regional Alumni Event with President Jorge G. Gonzalez.
Tuesday, March 11
Reception 6:30-8 p.m.
The Kitchen American Bistro
Located in the Sugar Building
1560 Wazee Street
Denver, CO
Please register by Monday, March 3 | Questions? Contact alumni@kzoo.edu or 269.337.7283
Looking forward for transcendence requires looking back with honesty. Essential to both: story sharing. Call that a blues sensibility. In November 1960 James Baldwin delivers a lecture in Stetson Chapel. Decades later the story of Baldwin’s visit inspires a timely story gathering. The voices are members of the Kalamazoo community recalling their experiences during the civil rights movement. The story gatherers are K students. That gathering effort—also known as “building the archive”—was a collaboration between Professor of English Bruce Mills’ senior seminar on James Baldwin and the Society for History and Racial Equity (SHARE), a local nonprofit organization founded by Donna Odom ’67. This K-Talk by those collaborators is fascinating, in part, because it’s far less lecture than it is story sharing, including, among others, stories from or about Harold Phillips, Walter Hall, Paul Collins, Robert Stavig, and, of course, James Baldwin. Mills and Odom and the other participants in this singular event show the power of storytelling to connect and celebrate diversity and to unite diverse individuals in the acts of imagining and then making a future that includes us all. The work’s neither quick nor easy, and needs that blues sensibility.
Resources
More black people, indigenous people, and people of color are choosing to attend K as students and work at K as faculty and staff. That’s progress in diversity, or “being here.” More progress is required in equity and inclusion, or “making ‘here’ home” for all. Home is deep and complicated. K is shaping itself into a space conducive to in-and-out-of-the-box ideas and actions that extend the arc from “being here” to “making ‘here’ home,” a place that every member of the K community considers to be their own. In this K-Talk, four members of the community describe the multitude of projects—a hard work as urgent as it is painstaking—that constitutes the march to extend the arc. These four educator-activists are D’Angelo Bailey ’05, Karen Isble (Advancement), Regina Stevens-Truss (Chemistry), and Rhiki Swinton (Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership). What they describe is eye-opening (in terms of need and effect) and inspiring. And a good start.
Allergic to gluten?!! What’s a brewer to do? Make mead and cider, decided Lauren Bloom ’07 and her partner, Matt Ritchey. They pulled up stakes from their successful, Chicago-based brewery and headed east (to Ann Arbor) to open Bløm, a cidery and session meadery. Lauren shares their fascinating mead-making story in this virtual tour. Meads (technically, honey wines) are a diverse lot, more so given the creative fermentations of Matt and Lauren. Their meads might feature hops, rhubarb, ginger, currant, even sumac—all Michigan-sourced, as are the fundamentals of mead and cider—honey and apples, respectively. Yeast makes mead from honey, so a good mead means keeping yeast happy, a task that can take a macabre and cannibalistic turn. Lauren will explain.
Read: “If You Seek a Pleasant Michigan Brew, Look About You” by Jeff Palmer ’76, LuxEsto
Watch: PBS Tastemakers featuring Bløm Meadworks
That question is crucial, says Professor of History Charlene Boyer-Lewis ’87, to a deeper understanding of the American revolutionary war era, a time of instability for much more than politics. Exactly what role did Margaret Shippen Arnold—wife of notorious traitor Benedict Arnold—play in the plot to deliver West Point to the British Army? Turns out a very active one, notwithstanding the many decades of her presumed innocence. A role active enough to be worthy of a post-war annuity of 500 pounds—for espionage services rendered at great personal risk. Boyer-Lewis contends that a revision of Margaret’s role from the margin of this spy story to its center more accurately illuminates the cultural upheaval that was part of the revolutionary era, a tumult that included a fluidity of identity that was eroding the rigidity and constraint of weakening gender roles. Like Margaret, many women of the era were strong actors who made political choices separate of their husbands. Margaret’s story shows the war transpired in households as much as on battlefields. The spy plot’s crisis of exposure reveals a capable woman who, in a “performance without faking,” exploits a gendered thinking that her leading role in the story is in the very process of revolutionizing.
WATCH the Smithsonian Channel’s episode of American Hidden Stories: Mrs. Benedict Arnold, featuring Dr. Boyer Lewis.
LISTEN to the podcast: Another Badly Behaving Woman featuring Dr. Boyer Lewis.
Brooklyn (NY)-based entrepreneur Peter Rothstein ’14, the 2019 Kalamazoo College Young Alumni Award Winner, shares his higher-ed story of trading a stronger brand for a deeper connection. The latter (a.k.a. Kalamazoo College) provides support and develops confidence in ways so that both endure a lifetime. As co-founder of the spiced beverage company DONA, Peter has used that support and confidence to meet the daily unexpected challenges of growing a new business. Don’t miss this story, and stay to the end…it’s as unforgettable as it is inspirational.
Read more about Peter Rothstein ’14 and his selection in the 2019 edition of 30 Under 30, Forbes’ annual list of 600 young visionaries from 20 industries.
Are you interested in hosting a K Talk in your city? Fill out the Hornet Host Event Form.
Even five-and-a-half decades after the class of 2019 experienced his spellbinding 12-minute commencement address, economist, teacher, author, and liberal arts advocate Kenneth G. Elzinga ’63 hopes those young women and men will, like him, be animated by a remembrance of great teachers. All Kalamazoo College graduates, he contends, share a wonderful heritage of the liberal arts, which is a gift to be cherished. And one expression of that reverence is humility. Do you know the name of the person who takes out your trash? A person with a liberal arts education should and is perhaps more likely to. Kalamazoo College and the liberal arts is a place and way of learning that extends grace—that unmerited favor, the “’Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.’” And grace should inspire a life of love and servant leadership. This short speech captures the heritage, the hope, and the meaning of a K education: past, present, and future. 
