A Trending Topics event scheduled for this past Tuesday has been postponed following the speaker’s hospitalization earlier this week.

St. Louis poet laureate Michael Castro was slated to speak and perform some of his poetry, but the day before the event, he asked to reschedule, as he is recovering from a visit to the hospital. Despite the cancellation, both Student Union and Spires, a national literary magazine co-sponsoring the event, are confident that the event will be rescheduled for later this semester.

Spires, an intercollegiate art and literary magazine based at Washington University, was funded $800 last April by SU Treasury as part of Trending Topics to bring Castro to campus. Trending Topics, the revamped SU Speaker Series, launched last year and is an initiative aimed at reducing cancellations with funded speakers by moving funding allocations to the spring of the previous year, instead of early fall, and giving SU the responsibility of actually booking speakers.

Junior Richard Wu, SU vice president of programming, said he is confident the event will be successfully rescheduled, especially as the contract has been agreed upon and Castro has already been paid.

“We’re working with humans, and people get sick, and people get injured, so this stuff happens and most of the time it’s just the matter of working with them and having open communication to find another good date,” he said.

Spires editor-in-chief George Zhou echoed Wu and said he is in direct correspondence with Castro. They are planning to reschedule for some time in November.

“Obviously we were bummed about it,” Zhou said. “But…as far as we know it’s still going to happen.”

The event was also initially scheduled to coincide with the release of Spires’ fall issue, which came out on Tuesday. However, Spires managing director and junior Catherine Thoms said that instead, people can read the issue to get excited for Castro’s visit, which will be the first time Spires has ever brought a speaker to campus.

Thoms added that the postponement would give them extra time to advertise the event, as they felt rushed completing the magazine and putting together the event simultaneously.

“We’re very excited to do something like this because this is kind of a big deal to get Spires out, get our name out [and] be able to engage the community better through an event like this beyond just publishing our magazine,” Zhou said.

Additional reporting by Sam Seekings.