More than 3,000 children have participated in creative writing workshops led by the nonprofit Uptown Stories in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood. Kate Reuther ’96, Founder and Executive Director of Uptown Stories, credits her Dwight Hall experience as an undergraduate as the early inspiration for the group, which champions youth perspectives and provides young writers the opportunity to discover and develop their inner voices.
Upon matriculating at Yale, Kate knew that working with children and the New Haven community were among her top priorities. After sharing her interests with staff at Dwight Hall, Kate was assigned to support Ms. Kathleen Cooney in a special education classroom at a New Haven public school.
At first, “I was somewhat naive, full of ideas and ambition,” Kate recalled. “I was surprised by the depth of hardship and poverty students were facing just a few blocks away from the school where I was having the best education.”
Kate credits Ms. Cooney with her transition into working in a high-needs classroom. “She became my first mentor as a teacher,” explained Kate. “I was volunteering to help [Ms. Cooney], but in reality, she was helping me a lot more, especially at first.”
Soon Kate was working in the classroom several times a week, a commitment that lasted for several years. Over time, she got to know the students as individuals and gained confidence in talking with parents and fellow teachers. Serving students with special needs also fostered lessons that she would take with her for the rest of her teaching career.
“This was the first time I realized that teaching was very satisfying to me,” she reflected. “I felt like I was making a difference, and building these relationships with kids was something I wanted to keep doing.”
Kate’s post-grad years were focused on deciding between pursuing writing or teaching, the two things she loved the most. She explored both, first taking a job in children’s book publishing and then pivoting to working as an after-school teacher, substitute teacher, and then as a full-time instructor. While teaching, she also worked on her writing, graduating with an MFA in Fiction Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.
After years of teaching primarily in public schools, Kate came to another important realization: she loved working with kids in a classroom, but she did not enjoy assigning test grades or teaching writing in the regimented, rubric-heavy method that most schools required.
These feelings led Kate to develop an “experiment” while on maternity leave: “What would happen if I taught a fiction writing workshop where there were no grades, where students were not required to come, and where they could write what they wanted?”
Kate’s curiosity inspired her to organize a writing workshop in Washington Heights, Manhattan, where she had returned to live with her family. She posted flyers advertising the workshop on lampposts and messaged Yahoo parent groups. The response was resoundingly positive–the kids loved the workshop and a second session was quickly in the works.
As the workshops continued to gain traction in her neighborhood, Kate decided she needed to incorporate as a nonprofit. Engaging the full spectrum of her community was paramount– “I wanted this organization to be for this community and of this community, particularly because [Washington Heights] is one of the last economically and racially diverse neighborhoods in Manhattan,” she emphasized.
Kate decided that programming would operate on a “Pay-What-You-Can” tuition model so that no child would be barred from participating because of their socioeconomic status or previous academic performance.
Today, Uptown Stories offers after-school, weekend, and summer creative writing programs for children ages eight through 18. The organization is composed of five full-time administrative staff and 12 teaching artists who are all practicing writers. Most workshops culminate with a reading at Word Up Community Bookshop, where many students publicly share their writing for the first time.
Students also leave their workshops with the honor of being published authors. Uptown Stories publishes a print anthology of student work about four times a year, spotlighting students’ poetry, comics, essays, screenplays, songs, and more. A copy of the anthology is given to every student and also sold at Word Up and local coffee shops. More than 10,000 pages of student writing have been published to date.
Despite attendance being voluntary, seventy to eighty percent of students become recurring participants after attending a single workshop. Kate noted that she has witnessed students who started in the program when they were eight, continued until they graduated high school, and even returned to work as teaching assistants.
Even if the majority of Uptown Stories students do not pursue careers in writing, the lessons they take with them are invaluable for shaping their understanding of the world and themselves. “For kids who have so little autonomy, and who often feel like victims or pawns in somebody else’s story, it is incredibly powerful to be in charge of their own story and their own world,” emphasized Kate.
Kate also highlighted the transformative potential of writing. “We need to validate and reinforce young people’s ability to imagine things differently from the world they are living in,” she asserted. “In order for these kids to do well in the world and for the world to do better, they need to be able to imagine other stories and possibilities.”
Student testimonials reflect these sentiments. One Uptown Stories alum noted that “poetry changed me because I learned to cope with everything that was going on that was unhealthy, and it made me feel understood and let me express myself… Uptown Stories changed the lens that I saw the world with, and even if the old one creeps back in, I know how to clean the dirt off and keep going.”
The lessons Kate learned from her days supporting Ms. Cooney’s New Haven classroom prove to be the throughline of Uptown Stories’ evolution. “The seed of that experience volunteering through Dwight Hall eventually flowered and grew in this organization that I have now been running for 12 years,” she reflected.
For students interested in following in her footsteps and pursuing careers in education and public service, Kate’s advice is simple: “Choose the thing that really matters to you and that you love to do and fight like hell for it. That gives you a better chance of making a difference and feeling connected to a community of people who are also doing that work together.”
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Kate’s Dwight Hall experience embodies the Grow pillar of Dwight Hall’s Engage, Grow, and Advance program delivery model, developing students’ intellectual, moral, civic, and creative capacities to the fullest with experiential learning, internships, fellowships, mentorships, and trainings.
You may learn more about Uptown Stories here.
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