Community Calendar

The Kalamazoo Book Arts Center functions as a creative public space where artists and book enthusiasts of all kinds gather to celebrate the collaborative arts of the book, including papermaking, printmaking, letterpress, bookbinding, and creative writing. KBAC preserves and employs traditional technologies while combining them with contemporary ideas and techniques. During this off-site ArtBreak, we will venture to KBAC to learn more about the organization and its diverse array of offerings!

The Kalamazoo Book Arts Center is located on the first floor of the Park Trades Center at 326 W. Kalamazoo Ave., Suite 103A. Enter the studio through the central door on Kalamazoo Ave. Parking is available on the street and across from the building on N. Church St. Parking garages are located at the intersection of Eleanor and Rose, and adjacent to the Radisson Plaza Hotel at the intersection of Water and Rose. Guests are also welcome to park in a KIA lot and walk to the Park Trades Center. Please do NOT park in the lot for Park Street Market or behind the Park Trades Center in the lot reserved for resident artists; cars parked in these lots are subject to towing.

Please note that this event will not be livestreamed or posted on YouTube.

Writer, humorist, and master of satire David Sedaris is coming to Kalamazoo for an evening of readings and recollections, Q&A, and book signing. One of the country’s preeminent humor writers, beloved for his personal essays and short stories, Sedaris writes in a style both autobiographical and self-deprecating, ruminating on family life, his middle-class, suburban upbringing, homosexuality, drug use, and obsessive behaviors. Several of his books have graced national bestseller lists, including Calypso, Naked, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, and Happy-Go-Lucky.

David’s books will be on sale in the lobby before and after the show. David will sign books for patrons before and after the show.

Reginald Dwayne Betts’s latest poetry collection, Doggerel, explores themes of Blackness, masculinity, vulnerability, and intimacy in a unique way–through the lens of dogs. This philosophical examination of everyday life, combined with Betts personal experiences with incarceration and life after, integrates the political with the personal. Join us as we discuss Doggerel with Betts in the Multicultural Center at Western Michigan University. During the event, we will encourage and welcome community members’ questions for the author. Books will be available for purchase and signing following the discussion.

The Multicultural Center is located in room 1021 of the Adrian Trimpe Building on the campus of Western Michigan University, at 1003 Ring Road South. Free parking is available after 5pm.

This program is made possible through the generous support of our community partners: Western Michigan University, the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership at Kalamazoo College, the Department of English at Kalamazoo Valley Community College, the Kalamazoo Public Library, the Kalamazoo Defender, and the Kalamazoo Bar Association.

For more information about this event and the suite of programs with Reginald Dwayne Betts, please visit kiarts.org/betts.

During this talk, Reginald Dwayne Betts will explore Felon: An American Washi Tale, a solo show that confronts the weight and legitimacy of the word “felon” through poetry, visual art, and performance. Drawing from his own story—sent to prison at 16, discovering poetry behind bars—Betts will offer an immersive meditation on incarceration, identity, and the power of art to reshape the narrative of who we are and who we might become.

Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet, lawyer, and the Founder and CEO of Freedom Reads, an initiative to radically transform access to literature in prisons. The author of a memoir and five collections of poetry, Betts is a MacArthur Fellow and has been awarded fellowships from Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, the National Endowment for the Arts, Emerson Collective, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School. Betts founded Freedom Reads in 2020 with a grant from the Mellon Foundation. To date, the organization has opened more than 500 Freedom Libraries in 50 adult and youth prisons across 13 states. These libraries provide a locus where conversation and community can begin inside and outside of prison walls, supporting the efforts of incarcerated individuals to imagine new possibilities for their lives.

This program is made possible through the generous support of our community partners: Western Michigan University, the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership at Kalamazoo College, the Department of English at Kalamazoo Valley Community College, the Kalamazoo Public Library, the Kalamazoo Defender, and the Kalamazoo Bar Association.

For more information about this event and the suite of programs with Reginald Dwayne Betts, please visit kiarts.org/betts.