The following story was originally published in Oswego's Palladium-Times/Oswego County News Now by Ken Sturtz '12. Reprinted with permission.
Emma Deloff trembled as she marched into the cavernous arena near the front of the procession and glimpsed countless sets of eyes, all of which seemed to be trained on her.
Later, as the 21-year-old stood and crossed the stage to the podium, a pair of white Nikes in hand, she said her legs felt like noodles and her face itched. She fought the urge to fiddle with her hair, worried her voice would cut out and marveled at the deafening silence.
“When I took that first breath on the stage, I told myself, ‘This is you. You’re going to do it and do it great,’” she said.
She popped the Nikes on a small table next to the podium and took a deep breath.
“Here we go again,” she said. “The alarm, clawing, screaming, breaking silent dreams.”
Deloff was the only individual student, aside from the student government president, chosen to make a presentation at the inauguration of SUNY Oswego President Peter Nwosu last month.
She said Nwosu wanted a student to deliver an original poem at his inauguration and the organizers contacted Laura Donnelly, chair of the English and Creative Writing Department. Deloff had studied poetry with Donnelly and considered her a mentor, but she was still stunned when she received an email over the summer from her professor offering the honor to her.
“I did not expect to be first pick because I didn’t think my work was really good,” she said. “I told her I could have picked three other students before I picked me.”
Deloff grew up in Hannibal and commutes to SUNY Oswego. She started at Cayuga Community College, earned an associate degree in creative and professional writing, and transferred to Oswego in fall 2023. In addition to her academics, she also juggles a part-time job three days a week at a liquor store near her home.
The senior creative writing major harbored an intense passion for writing and a desire to do as much as possible while a student. A sampling of her extracurricular activities includes serving as president of her sorority, co-editor of two student literary magazines and managing editor of the student newspaper. But her passion for writing didn’t exactly extend to poetry.
“When I transferred here, I had no interest in doing poetry,” she said. “I hated it, actually.”
Deloff had dabbled in writing poetry in the past, but found herself disappointed with her work and decided she didn’t want to do it anymore. Her intention was to focus on fiction writing, but her transfer adviser signed her up for a poetry class with Donnelly.
“I wasn’t trying to make my life complicated, so I went with it,” she said. “I definitely started with the intention to go for fiction, and poetry was going to be the backup track.”
To her surprise, she grew as a poet, first in intermediate poetry and then in advanced poetry, both with Donnelly. Her first work makes her cringe when she reads it now, but she steadily improved her skill and technique, which increased her confidence. And she began to develop her own voice as a writer, which she said her professor described as very grounded with deeper meaning, but not quite whimsical.
She started focusing on “harder truths” and exploring the inner mechanism of things she had experienced in her life. At the end of the advanced course, her work was compiled in a short book of poetry known as a chapbook. Deloff said she fell in love with the work and believed it was the best she had ever done.
After agreeing to create a poem, Deloff and Donnelly worked out a rough schedule. Deloff would send Donnelly a draft by a certain day and then they would meet to discuss it and for Donnelly to provide feedback. Deloff hasn’t gotten to know Nwosu on a personal level, but she said she has interacted with him individually at a handful of events over the last year and gathered that he cares deeply about students and is very empathetic.
She and Donnelly wanted to incorporate shoes into the poem as a nod to Nwosu’s oft-repeated story about keeping the worn shoes he had when he first came to the United States from Nigeria decades ago.
“I didn’t really know him as a person, but I knew the mission and event themes and ideas we wanted to include in the poem,” Deloff said. “And so it was kind of difficult to write a poem, not really about him and not the event, but the mission of student success.”
Deloff said the theme of the inauguration was transforming lives, but the college mostly gave her free rein and she wanted to make it relatable to a student audience.
“I really wanted it to be about the struggles that we face as students and things not a lot of people talk about,” she said.
She honed in on the ideas of being busy, dealing with deadlines and not having enough time. She wanted to emphasize the challenges of not having enough time, but also dealing with people who believe they’re being supportive when they say you can’t do something.
“The poem is about doing it despite those struggles,” Deloff said. “Surpassing that and being able to crest over those expectations.”
The poem incorporates elements of student life and the Oswego environment. It could be about Deloff, especially with lines about tying a pair of Nikes and “adorned in gold,” a reference to the gold robes students with a GPA of 3.8 or higher wear at commencement (Deloff has a 3.9 GPA). But it’s also meant to be about every student and the struggles they face.
Deloff and Donnelly labored through four drafts before they arrived at a finished product. Even then, Deloff said her perfectionist streak made her want to continue polishing the poem. The final draft wasn’t finished until a few weeks before the inauguration.
“That was when I found out that they liked the poem,” she said.
Deloff is used to being in front of crowds. She participated in school plays and musicals growing up and has sung the national anthem countless times in public. But she still gets nervous and even during rehearsal the week before inauguration she found herself feeling anxious as she read her poem for three people.
“And I saw all the chairs and I saw this giant space and I just kept imagining I’m going to be standing here before hundreds of people reading something that I created,” she said. “This is my poem. I made this.”
Deloff said she doesn’t remember much of what happened on stage the day of the inauguration.
She realized later that she had skipped a line and switched a couple of words, but it didn’t matter. She couldn’t recall if the audience clapped loudly, but she said she remembers feeling proud in the moment, particularly when she looked out and saw her father smiling in the audience.
Nwosu shook her hand as she left the stage. As she walked to her seat, she felt a wave of relief wash over her. Afterward, she said Nwosu shook her hand again and said that when things settled down he wanted her to come to his office to meet and look at his shoes.
As people she didn’t know walked up to her and congratulated her, Deloff said she felt proud, but really didn’t know what to say.
“It almost felt like a dream,” she said.