Retirement Celebration for Leslie Burke TODAY!

Leslie Burke

Leslie Burke, the Library’s intrepid Collection Services Librarian, is retiring at the beginning of July!  Faculty, students, and staff are invited to join us on Wednesday, June 12 for a celebration in her honor. We hope to see you there!

Wednesday, June 12, 2024
Noon – 1:30 p.m.
Book Club, Upjohn Library Commons

Please join us for hearty hors d’oeuvres, cake, and refreshments.

Therapy Dogs in the Library 10th Week!

Photo of a therapy dog

Relax and relieve some stress by spending a few minutes petting a furry animal friend! Therapy dogs will visit the Kalamazoo College Library lobby on Thursday, June 6 from 3 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. All students, faculty, and staff are welcome.

Date: Thursday, June 6
Time: 3 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.

Location: Upjohn Library Commons Lobby

Get Your Free Copy of the 2024 Reading Together Selection: Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

Book cover of Yellowface

The Kalamazoo Public Library sponsors Reading Together, a community reading series for the Kalamazoo area. This year’s selection is Yellowface by R.F. Kuang. Good news: YOU can get a free copy of the book!

The KPL Mobile Library will be on campus on Wednesday, January 31 in front of Hoben Hall from 11:00am to 12:00pm. Stop by and get your free copy of Yellowface, and follow Reading Together to find out what events will be happening (including the author’s visit in March!).

AntiRacism Reading Knook January 2024 Discussion

Faculty and staff and invited to come chat with Candace Combs about schools, learning English, and one child’s stories of life as a refugee in Oklahoma. We’ll center our discussion on the beginning of Daniel Nayeri’s hilarious YA book Everything Sad is Untrue. Please feel free to attend even if you haven’t finished the selection.

When: Tuesday, January 16 from 11:30am – 12:30pm
Where: Olmsted Room, Mandelle Hall and the #ARRK Team site.

You can find a PDF of the reading on the #ARRK Team site.

If you would like to join us in person for lunch, we’ve ordered some pizza.

For more information on the history of ARRK please visit the Inclusive Excellence website.


The AntiRacism Reading Knook (ARRK) is a collaboration between the K College library staff and our Inclusive Excellence (KCIE) leadership team. This initiative is NOT a book club, but seeks to facilitate campus-wide engagement with the books in the KCIE Reading for Change book collection. This collection was created to encourage learning about and facilitate greater access to antiracism information to all members of the campus community.

ARRK aims to:

  1. reduce barrier to entry into reading antiracism books,
  2. identify and highlight campus facilitators with experience teaching and/or disciplinary expertise who can provide context and guide discussions of specific texts,
  3. foster broader relationships among faculty and staff, and thus
  4. build greater capacity for an inclusive campus through sustained and focused engagement with shared texts.
  5. help catalyze members of the campus to engage in small group discussions of entire books in the collection (self-organized book clubs, if you will).

For further information on #ARRK see the KCIE AntiRacism Reading Knook page. To volunteer to lead one of these sessions complete the ARRK Discussion Leader application.

Therapy Dogs in the Library 10th Week

Photo of dog and students

Relax and relieve some stress by spending a few minutes petting a furry animal friend! Therapy dogs will visit the Kalamazoo College Library lobby on Thursday, June 1 from 3 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. De-stress a bit with a canine companion before finals week kicks in.

Date: Thursday, June 1
Time: 3 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.

Location: Upjohn Library Commons Lobby

Mark Nepo Author Reading and Q/A

Mark Nepo
Mark Nepo – spiritual writer, poet, philosopher. Author of The Book of Awakening.

Presenting author and poet Mark Nepo!

The Kalamazoo College Library is excited to present author and poet Mark Nepo for the first publication reading for his book, The Half-Life of Angels. A discussion and Q/A with a book signing will follow.

Event Details

When: Thursday, April 13, 2023 from 7:00pm – 9:00pm
Where: Hicks Student Center Banquet Room
(#12 on the Campus Map)

This event is free and open to the public!

Seating is first come first served (no reservations required).

Free visitor parking is available in the Hicks Center parking lot (blue on the campus map). Free street parking is available on a first-come first-served basis on Academy and neighborhood streets. Please observe posted limitations on these city streets.
More information about parking and printable campus maps

About The Half-Life of Angels

After fifty years of exploring, retrieving, and writing, poet and philosopher Mark Nepo is arranging his life’s poetry, more than 1400 poems, into several volumes to be published in limited editions. The Half-Life of Angels is the first volume in this series, containing three books of poems, written in his fifties and sixties.

The first book, A Thousand Dawns, explores the difference between hardening, which will help us get through life, and softening, which will let us experience life. The second book, The Gods Visit, explores one of the anchoring purposes of poetry, which is to help us settle more deeply into what is. This anchoring into the life of being gives us the strength to go on. And the third book, The Tone in the Center of the Bell, explores how we are shaped by the Oneness of Life. For once we open our heart, the thousand feelings come at us non-stop, the endless waves of a Mysterious Unity. How they wash over us and through us transforms us as we are worn into exquisite shapes by the friction of the world, grounded by our suffering and lifted by love and wonder. Let these poems be companions on your path to know yourself and the inner and outer nature of life more intimately.

For this publication event, Mark will offer a 35 minute reading from the new book, followed by a 35 minute question and response time, a second 35 minute reading, and a book signing to follow.

Please join us.

“To make our way through adversity requires an inner exploration we each must map for ourselves, though there are common passages along the way. Though our particular paths will vary, the ways we endure the storms we are given are timeless and the same. Once the rubble clears, we, like those before us, are inevitably called to build the world one more time, admitting that we need each other.” —Mark Nepo


Mark Nepo is a Great Soul. His resonant heart—his frank and astonishing voice—befriend us mightily on this mysterious trail. —Naomi Shihab Nye, author of You and Yours, 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, and Red Suitcase

Mark Nepo is one of the finest spiritual guides of our time. —Parker J. Palmer, author of A Hidden Wholeness and The Courage to Teach

Mark Nepo joins a long tradition of truth-seeking, wild-hearted poets—Rumi, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Mary Oliver—and deserves a place in the center of the circle with them. —Elizabeth Lesser, Cofounder, Omega Institute, author of Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

Nepo is a consummate storyteller with a rare gift for making the invisible visible. —Publishers Weekly