By Ava Geaniotis

The art of writing requires selecting the best words to use to tell a story, and so does blackout poetry – just in an innovative and unexpected way.

On Friday, April 10, The Delphian hosted its first ever Blackout Poetry Party in celebration of National Poetry Month. Blackout poetry is a style of writing poems by selecting words of a pre-existing writing piece before using markers to black out the unused surrounding text. 

At The Delphian’s event, hosted in the newsroom on the lower level of Earle Hall, students gathered to create their own blackout poetry using leftover copies of The Delphian’s newspapers from the 2025-2026 academic year. Students bonded over writing, poetry and the Italian buffet and pizzas catered for the event.

After finishing their blackout poems, attendees were encouraged to glue their work onto colorful construction paper. Many students used their creativity by cutting relevant photographs out of the newspapers and pasting them around their poems. Some created shapes out of the construction paper, as well, or used the black markers and pens to draw around their poems.

Senior English major Justin Schweickert said, “I had a lot of fun. Everyone had a lot of great poems. I had a great time.”

Schweickert’s blackout poem, ‘Mr. Adelphi,’ is about a man named ‘Adelphi’ who in his fiction runs the university. Schweickert said he was inspired by the prevalence of the word ‘Adelphi’ in one of The Delphian’s articles, and thought it would be humorous if he made his poem about someone with that as their name. 

Delphian Editor-in-chief Arpan Josan agreed with Schweickert’s feelings about the evening. “The event went so well,” Josan said. “We had an amazing night of laughter and food.”

The Delphian team hopes that this event is the first Blackout Poetry Party of many to come.