Organizers and readers from the Sigma Tau Delta and The Mercury student reading in Schmucker Art Gallery. (Photo Courtesy of The Mercury)
By Jules Young, Arts & Entertainment Editor
Last month, The Mercury and Sigma Tau Delta hosted a joint open mic event in the Shmucker Art Gallery to feature students’ recent writing projects. The Mercury is the literary magazine on campus, which compiles student writing and art projects each year, and Sigma Tau Delta is the campus’s English honors society. Together, these two groups planned a literary event to make themselves more known on campus and to grow interest in the English department in general.
This open mic-style reading was the first of its kind on campus, which made the event’s success all the more exciting. The reading was scheduled for two hours that Thursday evening, and the readings went on for the full two hours, with 11 participants reading various works of poetry, fiction and nonfiction.
The event was organized mainly by Madeline Swicord ’26 and Kenzie Smith ’27, the president of Sigma Tau Delta and the Editor in Chief of The Mercury, respectively. They advertised the event with much success, sending out hand-written letters to creative writing majors and professors. The reading saw roughly 30 guests including those who read, something the organizers were quite happy with, given that this was the first of these events.
One English department faculty member also read for the event: the new Emerging Writer Lecturer Lauren Osborn. She shared a recent work of short fiction that followed a couple living through the apocalypse, and their subsequent descent into madness as they spend the rest of their days living in a cave.
The Mercury and Sigma Tau Delta boards were very pleased with the success of this event, and the sizable turnout proved to them that readings like this are something that students on campus want. With this in mind, there is already talk amongst the groups to host another reading this semester, and certainly more in the next.
