Jessica English ’94 is the grand prize winner of the Kzoom Video $10,000 video services giveaway in Kalamazoo. Jessica owns and operates Birth Kalamazoo, which offers natural childbirth and breastfeeding classes, birth and postpartum doulas, lactation consults, and birth doula training. She received $7,500 in video services, after receiving 4,091 votes in the online voting contest.
Teju Cole ’96 has published a short story titled “Hafiz.” Or, rather, his followers have published it on Twitter through a series of tweets and retweets.
“I took advantage of the hospitality of my friends and followers online by asking them to tweet out certain things,” he told National Public Radio’s Rachel Martin recently. 
“…[W]hen I retweeted all of these things, in sequence, they all joined together to make a coherent story. It was just an idea, very much dependent on the generosity and kindness of the people I asked to participate, and I think it worked out quite interestingly.”
Here’s a sampling of the 30-plus tweets that compose the story:
11:05 AM – 8 Jan 2014
. . . to the subway, I saw a man on the ground. He sat on the sidewalk, under trees, with his feet out to the quiet street.
11:14 AM – 8 Jan 2014
There was a stillness in the scene, as in an altarpiece. There was a helpless air in those who stood around him.
12:07 PM – 8 Jan 2014
He gave no indication of being aware of our presence. He was tranquil, wordless. The tears were falling from his eyes.
12:59 PM – 8 Jan 2014
Coming close to take his pulse, I smelled alcohol. His tear-stained cheek shone. I placed a thumb on his wrist. His hand was cold.
Teju Cole is the author of critically acclaimed novel “Open City.” Listen to his interview with Martin and read “Hafiz” in this National Public Radio report.
Aaron Saari ’98 was recently hired as the new part-time pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Yellow Springs, Ohio. A bible scholar and theologian, Aaron is the author of “The Many Deaths of Judas Iscariot,” a book about the historical figure and the issue of suicide. He’s been a visiting professor at Xavier and adjunct instructor at Antioch University Midwest teaching courses in writing, Christianity, and non-Western religions.
Aaron, who grew up in Yellow Springs, hopes to attract new people to the church by emphasizing the church’s inclusivity and social justice commitment.
Read more about Aaron’s life and work in this Yellow Springs News article.
Ivana Ivkovic Kelley ’95 has launched a Kickstarter campaign to complete post-production of a documentary film she is making on the use of systematic rape as operational military doctrine during the Bosnian War. The fundraising campaign is the second associated with the project. A successful first campaign of $16,000 supported travel, filming, and production costs of the project, which is titled Persephone Speaks: The Forgotten Women of Bosnia. “The sexual violation of women erodes the fabric of a community in a way that few weapons can,” she wrote. “Rape’s damage can be devastating because of the strong communal reaction to the violation and the pain stamped on entire families. “I’m excited for this film to shed more light on the issue of sexualized violence, and hope this will be the first of many documentaries to come.” Ivkovic was born in Croatia and emigrated to the United States (Chicago) as a young child. Growing up she spent alternate summers “home” on the Adriatic coast with Croatian friends and relatives. Her first year at K was the year the Serbian army invaded Slovenia and Croatia, beginning the Bosnian War. For her Senior Individualized Project, Ivkovic worked for Kareta, a small nonprofit feminist group Zagreb, assisting survivors of Serbian rape-death camps.
After graduating from K (political science and women’s studies) Ivkovic earned an M.F.A. (playwrighting) from the University of Southern California and then worked for a number of small production companies and large studios in Los Angeles. She has interviewed many survivors of the war in Bosnia and recently left her studio job to devote her full time to completion of the Persephone project. The second Kickstarter campaign has less than a month to complete; readers are invited to participate.
Biology professors Jim Langeland ’86 and Blaine Moore join one K student and three K alumni as authors of an important paper that will soon be published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution. The co-authors are Nathalie Botezatu ’14, Maddie Gillentine ’13, Ashley (Boehmke) Benson ’08, and Kyle Wilson ’08. All were (or are) biology majors at K, and in the case of some, the scientific work—which describes the evolution of key molecules involved in Alzheimer’s disease—was part of a Senior Individualized Project (SIP). The work is groundbreaking in at least two ways. First, it approaches Alzheimer’s disease from an evolutionary perspective. And second, it illustrates a particular niche approach to research that the scientific environment at K is well positioned to pull off.
“The experiments that culminated in this paper began in 2007 with the SIP work of Benson and Wilson,” says Langeland. “The six-year duration shows that science can take a long time to come to fruition.” That duration derives, in part, from the complementary expertise of the two collaborating labs—Langeland’s expertise in gene evolution and Moore’s background in Alzheimer’s disease research and experience with cellular expression of proteins. According to Langeland, for most of the larger labs the exigency of understanding Alzheimer’s in order to development treatments for it may not favor such an extended timeline or evolutionary approach. Indeed, Moore says, “Most researchers in the Alzheimer’s field are exclusively focused on inhibiting the production of protein fragments that have been linked to the progression of the disease. One of the exciting aspects of this project was the chance to take a broader view of the proteins involved in the disease process.”
A broader view allows for unique approaches (suggesting that time and creativity are the two pillars of the particular niche approach to research for which K is so well-equipped). Six years ago Langeland decided to investigate the evolution of two molecules associated with Alzheimer’s—APP and BACE. BACE acts like a scissors to cut (or cleave) APP. The excess accumulation of one of the “cut pieces” (a.k.a. products or substrates, this particular one known as A-Beta) is linked to the development of the disease. Benson and Wilson sought answers to how far back on the evolutionary tree of life these molecules could be found. Turns out that APP is nearly a billion years old. BACE (and its cleavage effect) is much younger, about 500 million years old. Just down the hall, Moore’s lab had been studying the regulation of enzymes that produce A-Beta, and had well-developed systems for expressing Alzheimer’s proteins and analyzing cleavage products. Put the two together and you have a unique project that would have been unlikely at a larger institution or medical school.
The principle of natural selection suggests that BACE’s action on APP is vital to life in ways we don’t yet understand, according to Langeland. The A-Beta substrate may be some kind of mistake that natural selection is unable to “correct” because Alzheimer’s expresses so late in human lifetimes, usually long after reproductive success has been achieved. Moore says, “It’s essentially a wrong place, wrong time phenomenon. The APP substrate evolves the A-Beta motif, then comes in cellular contact with preexisting BACE. The result is a devastating disease process that is most likely an accidental by-product of some normal, as yet unknown, cellular process.”
Moore and his lab (including Gillentine and Botezatu) conducted an elegant experiment to confirm the importance of the BACE molecule. They expressed the BACE molecule from an organism—in this case a primitive marine dweller called amphioxus—that diverged from the human evolutionary branch some 750 million years ago. Amphioxus has no A-Beta. Then, Moore’s group discovered that amphioxus BACE nevertheless acts as a scissors to the human APP molecule. The result adds evidence to the biological importance (albeit unknown) of BACE’s cleaving action.
According to Langeland, an evolutionary approach to diseases may suggest molecular targets for treatment intervention, and, just as important, the limitation of a non-nuanced approach to potential targets.
The paper is titled “Asynchronous Evolutionary Origins of A-Beta and BACE-1.” The work was supported, in part, by a Great Lakes Colleges Association (GLCA) New Directions Initiative Grant, a program that supports professional growth of mid-career liberal arts faculty, with particular emphasis on projects outside traditional boundaries.
Writer-in-Residence Diane Seuss ’78 will have her third volume of poems, Four-Legged Girl, published in 2015.
Her first collection was It Blows You Hollow, and her second, Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open, received the Juniper Prize for Poetry.
Last month Seuss was interviewed by Missouri Review intern Anne Barngrover for the Review’s Text Box anthology (October 15). It’s a fascinating read, much like a Di poem: “Four-Legged Girl is specifically concerned with embodiment, beauty, loss, addiction and desire,” says Seuss. “Maybe it is post-body, post-beauty, post-grief, post-addiction, post-desire. I think so. I believe it is located more outside the boundary of community than my other books; its imagination is more iconoclastic, arriving at ferocity, femaleness, freakishness, and solitude–which to me is poetry.”
The interview touches on the treatment of religion (“I tried to be Catholic about the same year as I got breast buds.”), female sexuality (“The four-legged girl’s lonely freakishness is a signal of her monstrous royalty.”), and the recurrence of the name “Mary” throughout her work (“…maybe the four-legged girl is named Mary. I think my notion of the goddess has gotten a lot racier. But in tandem with that raciness is an omnipresent grief.)” The reader also learns a great deal about the College’s resident writer’s writing process–“I have never been someone who writes daily….There is a window of opportunity in which I know all and see all from the poem’s point of view and language palette….Once the window closes, I’m lost. Out of that lostness, when it’s just me and the dog and the nameless stars, comes the next poem.”
Kalamazoo College graduated its first group of Posse students in June 2013, its four-year orange-and-black anniversary in a national program that, in November, celebrates its silver anniversary.
K was the first Michigan school to partner with the Posse Foundation (with the organization’s Los Angeles chapter). The program finds students with academic and leadership potential who might otherwise be overlooked by traditional admissions metrics, gives them several months of training, and sends them off to elite undergraduate institutions in groups of 10 to 12 other students from the same city. The program also provides support for the students once they are on campus. Seeing K’s first 10 Posse graduates and their parents—and their tears—at K’s 2013 commencement, says Jon Stryker ’82, was very moving. “It’s not often you can give a gift that changes a life.” Stryker made a gift to K to support the first five years of the program. Posse at K will persist beyond those five years, and support for the program is a focus of K’s fundraising effort, “The Campaign for Kalamazoo College.”
In late October, the Chronicle of Higher Education published an article about the Posse Program’s 25th anniversary (“A Quarter-Century of ’’Posses’’ Underscores the Power of the Cohort,” by Libby Sander). The article quotes Kalamazoo College President Eileen B. Wilson-Oyelaran.
The W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research annually honors the best doctoral dissertation on employment-related issues. The 2013 Dissertation Award is shared by Gregory Leiserson and Will Dobbie. Dobbie is 2004 graduate of Kalamazoo College (major–economics and business; study abroad–Nairobi, Kenya; athletics–varsity cross country). His dissertation comprises three essays in the area of labor economics. The first essay estimates the impact of Chapter 13 bankruptcy protection on subsequent earnings and mortality. The second explores why market failures may exist in subprime credit markets. The third asks whether high quality primary/secondary schools are enough to significantly reduce social disparities. Dobbie earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University. The W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research is a private, nonprofit, nonpartisan, independent research organization devoted to investigating the causes and effects of unemployment, to identifying feasible methods of insuring against unemployment, and to devising ways and means of alleviating the distress and hardship caused by unemployment.
Robert Shiller, who became famous for calling the housing and Internet stock bubbles, was one of three Americans to win the 2013 Nobel Prize in economics. Today, he’s a professor at Yale. In 1963, he was a freshman at Kalamazoo College (see photo at left). He stayed at K through fall of his sophomore year before transferring to the University of Michigan. A true liberal arts learner, he took classes during his five K quarters from Don Flesche (political science), Jean Calloway (mathematics) and Conrad Hilberry (English). Five quarters? How does a student accumulate five quarters by the end of fall of sophomore year? That’s a little known fact of the early K-Plan. One could opt to complete one’s undergraduate studies and graduate in three years. Very few students elected that option and it dropped from disuse. “My experience at K was great,” wrote Shiller recently, “and helped set me on my path. I remember that it was my admiration of Bruce Timmons, an economics major at K, that got me into economics. It wasn’t so much my experience taking economics at K, I only got a B+ in intro econ, as I recall, which I thought, momentarily, might mean that I just did not have talent in economics.” Regarding his transfer to University of Michigan: “The reason I did so is a little complicated to explain,” wrote Shiller. “My foreign language was Russian, and so I did not have any place to go for my junior year abroad, and all my classmates would be gone, so I thought I might just switch to U of M. Another reason was that I signed in to the K three-year program, originally to graduate in 1966, but began to think I wanted to experience more years as an undergrad, and I thought joining a big college newspaper staff (the Michigan Daily) would be great fun. More fun than staying behind when my whole class went abroad. So, that is what I did.” At K, Shiller was a member of the Delmega Society, a student organization that attracted mostly math and science majors and serious students. Another K connection was provided by Professor of Economics Hannah McKinney. Shiller and another professor team taught McKinney’s macroeconomics class during her first year of graduate school. Congratulations on the Nobel Prize, Professor Shiller. We’re proud of your K roots.
Writer-in-Residence Diane Seuss won the Indiana Review 1/2K Prize for prose of 500 words or less. Brief nonfiction, prose poetry, or short-short stories are eligible for the prize. Di’s winning entry is titled “Wal-Mart Parking Lot,” and about it the contest judge wrote: “[It] offers readers an unexpected vision of American culture filtered through consumer culture and 20th century art history.” Di also was a finalist in three prestigious poetry competitions: the Orlando Prize (from A Room of Her Own Foundation); the River Styx Poetry Prize, 2013; and the Able Muse Poetry Prize, 2013. Last fall she was the MacLean Distinguished Visiting Professor in the English department at Colorado College.
New poems of Di’s appear in Unsplendid, Rattle, North American Review, and The Missouri Review. The latter journal featured the four poems in its online Text Box anthology, which includes an introduction to the poems (from which comes the Di Seuss quote that serves as title to this post) as well as questions and writing prompts. Di’s next public readings will occur November 4 (in Mount Pleasant, Mich., as part of the Wellspring Literary Series) and February 6, 2014 (at the University of Michigan, as part of the Zell Visiting Writers Series). Her third collection of poems, Four-Legged Girl, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2015.
