NYC
Poepathy is a student-led workshop series that seeks to help people navigate social adversity through a creative lens. Using poetry as a starting point, the project aims to open respectful dialogues about divisive topics.
Program Lead: Izzy
Izzy is a high school junior based in NYC and has been an AAUW NYC Metro Program Fellow since May 2025. She first fell in love with poetry after discovering a collection of children’s poems at the age of seven. At the time, poetry presented a creative outlet to streamline feelings about the rest of the world in an understandable manner.
As she got older, she also developed an interest in politics and world affairs, a topic that often produces many strong and complex emotions. She began to resonate deeply with poems on social and political subjects, such as work by Claudia Rankine in Citizen, which in turn helped her understand confusing emotions surrounding the state of the world.
Izzy created this project for the purpose of bringing more attention to the art form of poetry and its role in the political sphere, and how it can help young people navigate this world both emotionally and educationally.
Izzy has also written various policy memos on different topics for the AAUW NYC Metro website. You can find them here.
Poepathy Workshops
Gender Empowerment
Poepathy’s gender empowerment workshop seeks to empower and bond women and other gender minorities through the power of poetry. Through this workshop, we hope that students of all ages will find confidence within their gender identity and expression by forming bonds with one another as well as feeling pride within how they express themselves to each other and the world.
Immigration
Poepathy’s immigration workshop seeks to deal with both the emotions and facts surrounding the topic of US immigration in the present day. Through combining poetry and political resources, the workshop aims to understand the issue of US immigration on a level that is both personal and structural.