Fairy lights twinkled against the dark bluing night sky as the murmur of the audience drifted in waves, carried by the breeze, weaving in and out of rows of seats, dissipating towards the front, where a wooden lectern stood against the red-bricked background of Rice University’s Ray’s Courtyard.

It is here that poet Dave Lucas began to speak. Lucas’s curled hair, thick-rimmed square glasses and colorful shirt caught the eye of the audience, who were already transfixed by his soft but urgent voice. Lucas’s reading was complimented by explanations of his creative process. He spoke on getting his heart broken, and more than that, he talked about writing about getting his heart broken. Lucas’s poetry reading focused on a series of poems about love, culminating around a girlfriend from his college years. Stopping only to accommodate the noise of passing planes overhead, Lucas’s voice, his friendly demeanor, enabled the audience to consider him more of a friend than an academic distanced from them in experience and age.

As Lucas wrapped up, he introduced writer Michael Croley, a friend and fellow writer. Croley’s thick Southern accent surprised the audience, subverting expectations for what a writer “should” sound like. Croley read an excerpt from his book, engaging the audience in laughter, smiles and the occasional gasp as he slipped in explicit language here and there throughout his characters’ dialogue, making his piece realistic enough for the audience to imagine themselves within the pages of his book.

Croley’s reading ended with an introduction to Tomás Morín, a professor here at Rice. He joked in his introduction that it’s impossible to be happy for someone like Morín because of Morín’s long list of accomplishments.

Morín shyly made his way up to the stage, laughing alongside Croley in a way that gave the audience a glimpse into their friendship.      

Tomás Morín’s reading included excerpts from his book, Machete: Poems. Within this reading, he focused on the intersections of race and pop culture, he highlighted relationships to self and to family, and he drew upon themes of being othered and alienated. Morín’s reading, though arguably meant to be the focal point of the evening, spanned no longer than either Lucas’s or Croley’s — perhaps a tribute to Morín’s own humility and desire to share the stage with other writers of his own caliber.

The night ended as it began, with Ian Schimmel, a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Rice, giving a statement to the audience. In his closing remarks, he invited the audience to purchase a book and to perhaps try to get Morín’s signature, though he jokingly made no promises as to whether or not members of the audience would be able to procure such a signature. By the time the event ended, the sky had darkened completely, and the audience was eager and excited to leave their seats to strike up conversations with the authors who had just read their work aloud. The crowd began to dissipate as the night wore on, and the seats were eventually collected and put away, the lectern taken back inside, and the tables folded up and removed from view as the courtyard eventually emptied.