WMU

Cara Lieurance talks to David Binney about why he moved back to California after nearly 38 years in the New York jazz scene, and how his restless creativity leads him to new projects. 

Retired Western Michigan University professor Miriam Bat-Ami crosses many literary genres. She writes books for kids and young adults as well as memoirs, creative nonfiction, and fiction for adults. To choose her genre, she considers her audience and asks, "Who will be part of this conversation?" With her new poetry collection, Measuring the Marigolds (Caffeinated Press, 2018), Bat-Ami speaks to adults experiencing the ups, downs, and in-betweens of family relationships.

Western Michigan University Professor Tiffany Schriever and a team of students spend part of their time from spring to fall in the coastal wetlands near Lake Michigan. The Professor of Biological Sciences says they look in the places between dunes along the eastern shoreline of Lake Michigan. “That’s about four degrees of latitude and over 500 miles." Schriever says that leads to large variations in the species they find.

Western Michigan University Biological Sciences professor Tiffany Schriever says she and a group of students walk the trails down to wetlands from spring to fall. They use nets and water chemistry equipment to test the waters near the Great Lakes coastline.

Schriever will be among the presenters at Western Michigan University’s Spring Convocation on Tuesday, March 26th at the Fetzer Center. She says they have found great diversity in wetlands, even those that are relatively close together.

It's not everyday you meet a musical group that's been together for 33 years. Even rarer is a group of 33 years' standing that includes all of the original founding members. Ann Elliott-Goldschmid (first violin), Sharon Stanis (second violin) and Joanna Hood (viola) joined Cara Lieurance for a trip down memory lane and a look at their program for March 20 at Western Michigan University's Dalton Center Recital Hall on the BPI Series. 

Rostislav Dubinsky, the great Russian violinist of the Borodin Quartet who moved to the United States in the early 1980s to teach at Indiana University, was a major early influence. A friend of the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, he shared his insight and musical notes on the composer's intentions. Now based in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, the members of the Lafayette Quartet say they took their name from the Detroit boulevard of the same name, where they lived soon after forming the group.