Horane Daley from the Bronx and Rickey Strachan from Brooklyn first met at a poetry camp in Syracuse and later learned they were both heading to Oswego. In their time as Lakers, they have each published two books of poetry, developed a solid friendship, continued to grow as writers and contributed to the campus in many ways.

"It was a group of us. We were all just trying to get to know each other," Daley, a psychology major, recalled. "I would've never really thought, because we didn't talk much that day. So I would've never thought that something would come, but the next day we started classes and I realized he was in my class. And then a week later we realized we were both poets." 

"It's ironic because we actually spent that whole time together because both of our classes were together," said Strachan, a public relations major. "We had one class that was different, but the other two were together. So we basically saw all aspects of each other in a way. And then when we had the idea to do the piece."

"We had both decided to come here without us knowing," Daley said. "So I remember when I was graduating in my senior year of high school, I called him and I asked him what college he was going to and he said, 'Oswego.' I was like, there's no way, I'm going Oswego!"

Since coming to Oswego, they have each published two books of poetry -- “Things Cupid Whispered” in 2021 and “What I Did With Those Words" in 2022 for Strachan, and "To the Clothesline" in 2021 and “The Boy That Wrote Love" in 2022 for Daley.

"My words have the most emotion when I'm talking about the subject of love. It could be any type of love," Daley said.

The similarity of their themes reflects both being "hopeless romantic poets," in Strachan's descripton.

"Because we were both going through a tough time a lot of the time, so it was just kind of ironic," Strachan said. "But we called ourselves love poets. We called ourselves hopeless romantic love poets because it felt like it wasn't getting anywhere. What comes naturally to me, because I could write a poem about anything, but the thing that's easiest to write about, besides like why I write, is writing about loving someone or experiencing love. It just comes second nature almost, like I should have been doing it for even longer than I have."

Creating work based on what you know and what inspires you are key ingredients, he added.

"When something moves you, you have to express it in some way, whether it's to draw, whether it's to write, whether it's to sing," Strachan said. "But I feel like writing, because we have to do it in so many different ways, is the easiest way to tap into that creativity."

Starting their friendship as fellow poets was great, but spending so much time together in their adventures in writing and publishing has made it much more remarkable, they said.

Poetry "was a really beautiful seed to it, but it became a friendship that was just like we're taking a journey that's very similar," Strachan said. "But at the same time, it's also just a mutual understanding of the fact that we find each other in the same place and we are going to the same place, and we're doing it at the same time. And now we're doing it in the same space. And I really cherish that."

Read more: