Kurt Luchs has a ready laugh. The moment you think he’s serious, he’s not. For much of his life, Luchs has written comedy and humor for TV, radio, and in books. But then he decided to get serious, and and the humor writer became a poet.

Chris Broadbent rides his bike through Kalamazoo’s Vine neighborhood, towing a trailer loaded with buckets. He pulls up behind an apartment building, takes a bucket up the stairs to a back porch, and swaps it for one filled with food scraps. He’ll make a couple more pickups around the city this afternoon. The peels and trimmings are destined for a bin in his backyard.

It’s A Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play is currently playing at Farmers Alley Theatre in Kalamazoo. WMUK’s Gordon Bolar has this review.

Director Chris Ludwa and Cara Lieurance highlight several musical selections of the Kalamazoo Bach Festival Chorus' upcoming Holidays With The Bach Festival Chorus concert, including the familiar carols "Angels We Have Heard On High" and "O Holy Night," to "Ose Shalom," a nod to the Hannukah holiday, and John Rutter's setting of the Gloria, a modern classic. They also preview Holiday Beer Choir, an event where anyone can sing along. It will be held at 7:30 pm Thursday, Dec 19 at Old Dog Tavern. 

The Kalamazoo Ringers' Martha Matthews, the Kalamazoo Male Chorus' Erik Jacobson, and the Kalamazoo Youth Jazz Orchestra's Benje Daneman join Cara Lieurance for a musical preview of the 11th annual Christmas in Kalamazoo, which will be held at 7:30 pm Tuesday, Dec 3 at Centerpoint Church in Kalamazoo. While each group will perform some pieces solo, the directors say their favorite selections are the unique arrangements for combinations of two or all three groups together.

The concert is free, but a freewill offering will be accepted.

A founding member of the Americana band The Corn Fed Girls, and co-host of Grassroots on WMUK, singer-songwriter Darcy Wilkin will soon release her first solo album, Bristol. She'll feature music from the new project in an album release concert at 8 pm on Saturday, Feb 8 at Bell's Eccentric Café.

Kalamazoo native Shonda Buchanan now lives in California. She moved, in part, to put some distance between herself and her family. A poet, educator, journalist, and professor, Buchanan is the daughter of mixed blood — tri-racial and tri-ethnic African-American, American Indian, and European-American - families who migrated to southwest Michigan from North Carolina and Virginia in the 18th and 19th centuries. Buchanan tells her story in the new memoir, Black Indian (Wayne State University Press, 2019).