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.
Bret Linvill ’15 (center) during his summer internship, flanked by alumni supervisor Jerry Mechtenberg-Berrigan ’97 (right) and Jerry’s son, Amos. Linvill’s was a Community Building Internship organized jointly with the College’s Center for Civic Engagement.
Autumn’s active in the Center for Career and Professional Development (CCPD). The Recruiting Expo and the Professional Development Institute are hard-to-miss fall events. And you often find CCPD staff speaking in upper-level classes and first-year seminars. Every day CCPD staff members help students with career counseling, with assessment tools, and with application materials. And fall’s the time CCPD reaches out to alumni and parents to invite their partnership in providing summer career development opportunities for students.
Alumni and parents, let us know if you will host a summer student, either through the Discovery Externship Program or as a K Intern in the Field Experience Program.
Externships: Short Homestay and Job Shadow
Past externship hosts, who have housed students and hosted them in their workplace for up to four weeks in the summer, become enthusiastic advocates for the program.
“John and Tyler were wonderful externs! Not only did we enjoy them tremendously, but we received such positive feedback from our colleagues who graciously spent time with them. The days were long and hectic, but our dinners were relaxed and full of conversations about their days, their impressions, the state of medicine, and more.” – Sherri Seifert ’83
“It is always great to connect with a current K student and to spend time sharing my home and work life. As I have become more professionalized in my career, I find I can more comfortably provide advice and insight into working in the arts.” – Bethany Whitehead ’98
“Discovery Externship is a special program that I highly endorse. I wish all college students could have such an experience. The students come well prepared and ready to try out new things. And we seem to benefit just as much as they do.” – Anne Dayanandan ’75
Other comments:
“I found it a lot of fun. I enjoyed showing our student what practicing medicine is like. It helped me reflect on what I was like at 19 trying to make similar career decisions.”
“Hosting a K student was a lovely experience. It was fun to get to share my experiences at and beyond K with her. When I was at K, wondering what I might do next, I had no idea what graduate school was all about. I enjoyed being able to offer a K student a glimpse of that next step and to provide some guidance about how to get there.”
“I enjoyed the opportunity to talk with the extern about my own scattered career path. I reassure students that career paths do not need to be defined at graduation and do not need to be linear. I wish I had someone to talk to about such concerns when I was a student.”
“It’s great to see the level of intellectual curiosity that I remember as a hallmark of my time at K is still alive and well in the current student body. My extern made me feel as if the DNA of the college was still much the same–the students are there because they are truly engaged and committed to learning. That was nice to see.”
Internships: Summer Workplace Immersion
Externship host Bridget Blough ’08 (right) shares a day at the beach with her two summer externs.
Alumni and parents who select and supervise student interns for at least six weeks through the Field Experience Program are similarly effusive. They cite many benefits of involvement, including:
– Engagement with talented, idealistic, dedicated students;
– Enhancement of the projects to which interns are assigned;
– The real and valuable work undertaken by the students;
– The learning that goes both ways;
– The opportunity to see future leaders learn and grow by doing.
The program’s structure–a sliding-scale stipend, a learning contract, regular contact with the CCPD through reflective assignments, final evaluations, and official transcript notation–ensures that learning goals and mutual expectations are established and met.
The CCPD is currently fielding inquiries and confirming participation for both extern and intern hosts for summer 2014. Alumni and parents may indicate their interest in either program online, and a CCPD staff member will respond by mid-November. As fall turns to winter, our students will head off for winter break, and the CCPD’s summer line-up will be complete.
Alyssa Rickard ’12 works for the Africa Department of Freedom House, an independent watchdog organization that supports democratic change, monitors the status of freedom around the world, and advocates for democracy and human rights. The organization’s Johannesburg (South Africa) office–and Rickard–are working on a project seeking people in southern Africa to serve as mentors to 20 Fellows of a Freedom House program called Empowerment of a New Generation of Leaders in Southern Africa (ENGLSA). The Fellows (and prospective mentees) are men and women between 25 and 45 years old from government, private sector and civil society organizations in Namibia and South Africa, all of whom are committed to ethical leadership and accountable governance. Prospective mentors will use one-on-one and group meetings as well as virtual interactions to mentor, drawing from their personal experiences and professional backgrounds to serve as trusted counselors, loyal advisors, sounding boards and coaches to mentees. Mentors will help the Fellows reflect on their developing competencies and enhance their leadership capacity. In her work, Rickard, who earned her B.A. as a political science major, is drawing on some of her own undergraduate mentors as resources, specifically the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership’s Lisa Brock and Prexy Nesbitt. Rickard took the College’s course on Nelson Mandela, co-taught by Brock and Nesbitt, and later joined one of Nesbitt’s trips to Africa. Both Brock and Nesbitt have extensive networks of social justice leaders in southern Africa that might help Rickard and Freedom House recruit the mentors for ENGLSA. The connection is one example of the worldwide impact of the ACSJL.
Kalamazoo College officials today announced that they have raised more than $84 million in gifts and pledges in The Campaign for Kalamazoo College, a $125 million effort intended to help K “elevate excellence” and “expand its impact” on and off campus.
The College launched the campaign in March 2010. The anticipated end date is June 30, 2015. With today’s announcement, the College moves into a more public phase in which all alumni and other friends of the College will be asked to make a contribution to one of four campaign priorities: student opportunity and access, faculty excellence, K-Plan enrichment, and capital projects.
“The $84 million committed by donors thus far is an amazing statement about how much they value K and the exceptional education we offer students,” said K Board of Trustees Chair Charlotte Hall ’66. “This is a very exciting time at Kalamazoo College,” she added. “This campaign supports a strategic plan that builds on the College’s mission and its historic strengths. It will elevate excellence across campus–excellence among our faculty, excellence within the student body, and excellence across our campus facilities.”
According to Kalamazoo College President Eileen B. Wilson-Oyelaran, the impact of the campaign is already being felt. “More than $7.5 million in new student scholarships enables us to enroll highly talented students regardless of their economic backgrounds,” she said. “Six newly endowed faculty positions help assure that these students are educated by stellar teachers and scholars.
“We have begun to strengthen the experiential programs that power the K-Plan,” she added, “including international engagement, career internships, leadership development, and student research.
“Because of donor generosity, we have also invested in a number of building projects—-such as the Hicks Student Center, K athletics fields and the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership—-that enrich the student experience and foster an even closer campus community.”
Nearly half of the estimated $20 million needed to replace the College’s aging natatorium and build a new fitness and wellness center has been pledged by donors.
“These and future gifts will have a profound impact on our students and ultimately the communities in which they will live and work,” said Wilson-Oyelaran. “This campaign will help K expand its impact on and off campus and help our students do more in four years so they can do more in a lifetime.”
Among the many who gathered for the public launch of the campaign for Kalamazoo College were (l-r): Trustee Emeritus Phil Carra ’69, Louise Fugate, Professor Emeritus of German Studies Joe Fugate, and Chair of the Board of Trustees Charlotte Hall ’66.
Hannah Knoll ’13 is a recent Kalamazoo College graduate with a passion for design and an aspiration to be an architect. She majored in physics with minors in mathematics and studio art. “I am interested primarily in the relationship between community and the physical landscape, leading to my desired career in architecture or urban design, fields I began to explore through jobs, internships and my study abroad experience in Copenhagen, Denmark,” said Knoll. She is currently updating architectural drawings for K’s facilities management department and serving as the Post-Baccalaureate Fellow in Art for the 2013-2014 academic year. Her busy schedule nevertheless left her time to enter ArtPrize. Her submission is called “Spaces Between.” The entry includes five bench-like objects that together outline a single rectangular form that relates to the room it is in.
“The fragmentation of this rectangle creates spaces between the individual pieces, spaces that can be experienced by the viewer as they sit and interact with the work. This is part of a series of projects exploring how physical elements and objects that shape space can influence social interactions.”
Rob Dunn ’97 is extensively quoted (and his best-selling book cited, The Wild Life of Our Bodies: Predators, Parasites, and Partners That Shape Who We Are Today) in an article by Nancy Churnin that appeared in the Dallas Morning News’ “Dallas News Life.” The article, “Be nice to your bacteria and they’ll be nice to you, doctors say,” notes a growing belief among experts that good health is strongly influenced by the ecology of the multitudes of bacteria that reside in our bodies and in our natural environment. It cites examples of probiotic treatment, or the introduction of bacteria as a therapeutic measure to restore the balance of bacterial populations in the body. It is a fascinating read, and Dunn is at his curious K best, equating excitement with the new found extent of all we don’t know. Dunn is a scientist and professor at North Carolina State.
