This Friday, Sigma Tau Delta, the English honors society at Syracuse University, held its first event since coming back to campus this semester.
The event, entitled “Coffee House,” hosted by the honors society and sponsored by the English department at SU, was held in the basement of the Schine Student Center in the Jabberwocky Café.
Students and faculty alike were invited to share literary works and poems that revolved around the theme of bravery in all its forms, in honor of the day civil rights activist Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a bus in Montgomery Alabama on December 1st 1955.
The event was free of charge, however the society also organized a raffle. Winners will receive signed and personalized copies of Lincoln in The Bardo by Syracuse University professor George Saunders— recent winner of the Man Booker Prize, a prestigious literary prize awarded each year for the best original novel written in English and published in the UK.
Other prizes included a gift card to be used at Electric Avenue Tattoo Shop in Syracuse, and three signed and personalized copies of works by Dana Spiotta, professor at SU and a recipient of awards such the Rome Prize in Literature, the Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
The proceeds for the raffle are going towards buying books for the Hillbrook Youth Detention Center, a juvenile detention center in Onondaga County, New York.
“I think events like this are very important,” says Laura Kellerman, Senior television radio and film major at Syracuse University. “It not only bring the SU community together, but they also strive to help the greater Syracuse community as a whole,” she says.
Due to a recent change in the New York state legal system, teenagers under the age of 18 will no longer be prosecuted as adults— as is already the case in many states across the country.
As a consequence to this recent change, the Hillbrook Detention center will soon be seeing more youths through its doors and the institution’s library is in dire need of an upgrade.
“New books will help the kids arriving at Hillbrook see that that are not alone,” says Karen Miranda, member of Sigma Tau Delta and senior Italian, Advertising and English major at SU.
Syracuse’s Sigma Tau Delta society will be using the proceeds not only to buy more books to replenish the Hillbrook library, but its members are specifically planning on buying new books and literary works that are more accessible, relatable, and enjoyable for the young adults that are, and will soon be, relocated to the juvenile detention center.
“A good library can provide an outlet for these young adults to help deal with the situations they are in more positively,” says Miranda.
