By: Margot Dragos
Brooklyn College’s (BC) Riverrun Club put students’ literary knowledge to the test at their first Literary Trivia Night, hosted during the day in Boylan 2307 on April 21.
The Riverrun Club consists of interns from the English Majors’ Counseling Office. Attendees were asked questions about everything literary, from dystopian literature to graphic novels.
Nicholas “Nicky” Cai, an intern and junior majoring in English, created a “Trivia Power Team” that used their knowledge of literature to write out and fact-check dozens of questions.
“We specifically selected questions we believed would be fun but not too hard at the same time,” Cai told The Vanguard.
The questions were split into categories such as children’s literature, modern fiction, and fantasy. There were five questions in each category, varying in difficulty.
These questions, including: “Who is Bruce Wayne’s secret identity?” from the graphic novel category, were easy to answer. Others, such as “Which epic poem is the video game ‘Devil May Cry’ based off of?” stumped attendees.
“I was actually fairly confident all of the time,” said Sabrina Zambi, BC senior double-majoring in English and creative writing. “Many of the epic poem questions I knew, except for that one deep cut about a video game. I had no idea what that was about.”
The answer was revealed to be “The Divine Comedy” by Dante.
Daryl Blankenship, a creative writing major, confident in his knowledge of graphic novels, was stumped by a question in the category.
“First question was Black Panther’s Home Country. Knew that,” Blankenship told The Vanguard. “The second question, first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize? That was kind of insane.”
However, those playing in teams were able to pool their knowledge together to answer tough questions.
“I really liked being on the team and how every single one of us has knowledge about different things,” said Mikhal Tubis, a BC junior and creative writing major who teamed up with Zambi. “I knew a lot about Shakespeare and Sabrina knew a lot about poetry and dystopian, so it was very much a group effort, and that was a lot of fun.”
Teams worked together to write an answer for each question on a piece of paper. The interns running the event waited until all teams were finished before progressing to the next question.
After all questions were answered, the interns collected and thoroughly graded each paper to determine a winner. BC student Fritz Philogene II won first place, a group of interns not involved with creating the questions won second, and Zambi and Tubis’s team won third, along with their teammates Natalia Urbaez and Edona Zuka.
Every attendee was given a small gold trophy with “Literary Trivia Champion” written across its cup with a Sharpie. They left with enhanced knowledge of the literary greats, bragging rights, and new literature-obsessed friends.
Blankenship said the people were his favorite part of the event.
“The noise and personality that everybody else was bringing in the space, I really appreciated,” said Blankenship.
“It was really nice seeing people riled up about their answers and doing it in a writing and literature scope.”
Students interested in future Riverrun Club-hosted events can follow @thejunctionbc on Instagram.