Emma Poppink Brock and Samuel Ivan Howard were married Oct. 13 at Bell’s Brewery Eccentric Cafe in Kalamazoo, Mich. Mark H. Schauer, a Universal Life minister and a friend of the bride’s father, officiated.
Ms. Brock, 28, works in New York as the creative director of the “Basic Bachelor Podcast,” which recaps and does interviews with those appearing on the “Bachelor” television franchise on ABC. She is also a musical theater actor, who in 2014, 2017 and 2018 appeared as Sister Mary Patrick in the national and international tours of “Sister Act, the Musical.” She graduated cum laude from Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio.
She is the daughter of Sue E. Poppink of Portage, Mich., and the late Kenneth R. Brock III. Dr. Poppink teaches research and qualitative methods to doctoral students in the educational leadership department at the College of Education at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. The bride’s father was a political strategist for candidates running for office in Michigan.
Mr. Howard, 30, is pursuing an M.B.A. at the University of Rochester. Until 2015 he taught geometry at Battle Creek Central High School in Battle Creek, Mich. He graduated from Western Michigan.
He is a son of Diane L. Howard and Mark J. Howard of Dorr, Mich. The groom’s mother, who is retired, was a case worker in the Pawpaw, Mich., office of Michigan Works!, a government-funded job program. His father is a salesman at Todd Wenzel Chevrolet in Hudsonville, Mich.
The couple met in 2015 when Ms. Brock organized a concert on top of a garage in Kalamazoo where Mr. Howard performed some of his own songs on guitar, and three weeks later they rediscovered each other, more romantically, on the Tinder dating app.
