Kalamazoo College’s first-year students will take an important first step in connecting with each other and with faculty and staff when the 2021 Summer Common Reading author visits campus this week. 

Marianne Chan is the author of All Heathens, which was the winner of the 2021 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award in Poetry and the 2021 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry. She will participate in a book reading and signing with students on Thursday and a student colloquium Friday morning at Stetson Chapel. 

In her 2020 book, Chan navigates her Filipino heritage by grappling with notions of diaspora, circumnavigation and discovery by revisiting Magellan’s voyage around the world. The author’s poems have been published in Michigan Quarterly Review, Cincinnati Review, West Branch, Rumpus and elsewhere. From 2017 to 2019, she served Split Lip Magazine as its poetry editor. 

Chan grew up between Stuttgart, Germany, and Lansing, Michigan, before earning a Bachelor of Arts in English from Michigan State University. She went on to study poetry at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where she earned her Master of Fine Arts. She now lives in Cincinnati with her partner, Clancy, and her cat, Bella, and is pursuing a Ph.D. in English and creative writing at the University of Cincinnati. 

Chan’s appearance at K will cap the Class of 2025’s experience with the Summer Common Reading program, which connects the K community in conversations about their book. Frequently, the author returns in four years to speak at the class’s Commencement. 

Learn more about K’s Summer Common Reading program at the First-Year Experience website.