Between the Lines

He refers to himself as an American. A muddy, filthy, cranky American. Kalamazoo resident Mark Wedel got that filthy by riding a bicycle along the trails of the Great Allegheny Passage and Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Towpath in May 2017. He wanted to experience the solo ride but he also wanted to reach Washington D.C. to express his crankiness about the results of the 2016 presidential election. Wedel writes about his journey in Mule Skinner Blues.

They met at a party and their conversation naturally turned to art. Mary Hatch is a visual artist; Elizabeth Kerlikowske a poet. The two began to exchange their work, matching words to images. It worked – so well, in fact, that they decided to create a business and then a book. Art Speaks: Paintings and Poetry pairs poems with paintings.

Mermaids have been swimming through books and movies and people’s dreams through the ages. Wondering why Lake Michigan didn't have its own mermaid, author Linda Nemec Foster, the founder of the Contemporary Writers Series at Aquinas College, and Anne-Marie Oomen, an author and teacher at Interlochen’s College of Creative Arts, decided to create one. Their new book, The Lake Michigan Mermaid: A Tale in Poems (Wayne State University Press, 2018), is illustrated by Meridith Ridl.

Immigrants often face prejudice. As an immigrant from Taiwan, Chien-Juh Gu, an associate professor of sociology at Western Michigan University, knows this first-hand. She's explored the immigrant experience of middle-class, professional Taiwanese women in the U.S. Her latest book is The Resilient Self: Gender, Immigration, and Taiwanese Americans (Rutgers University Press, 2017).

A conversation over Thanksgiving dinner inspired Portage resident Tony Edwin, known as Tony Ettwein to his friends, to compile the events and milestones of a single year, one day at a time. That year was 1968. Looking back half-a-century later, Edwin says he realized that it was a year like no other. His new book book is 1968 Plus 50: Looking back at the historic, tumultuous year of 1968.