Hi! I'm Izzy and I am a rising senior at the Brearley School in New York City.

 

I first fell in love with poetry after I discovered a collection of children’s poems when I was 7 years old. For me, poetry presented a creative outlet to streamline my feelings about the rest of the world in an understandable manner. As I got older, I also developed an interest in politics and world affairs, a topic that often produced many strong and complex emotions with me.

 

Poems on social and political subjects, such as work by Claudia Rankine in Citizen and poems about identity by Ocean Vuong, really resonated with me and helped me sort out some of the confusing emotions that I had felt about the state of the world. The intersection of poems and politics is one that can be both informative and soothing; however, it is also one that is rarely talked about or brought light to. This project was created 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.