AMY MAIELLO HAGEDORN TRAINING INSTITUTE
In Partnership with the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook University

Timeline:

Summer 2025 Training Institute: Participants will attend a twice weekly, 12-session, either 9:30 to 12:00 pm OR 6:00 to 8:30 pm EST July 8 – August 7, 2025. Full commitment to the 12-session sequence is mandatory.

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September 2025 through June 2026 Practicum: Participants will be required to meet with the Herstory team on a weekly basis for two hours for the first four weeks of the implementation phase, to share the challenges and high points of the early adaptation of the pedagogy to their settings and to work through their challenges and successes with the group. After that they will continue to meet for two hours for the next three months on a bi-monthly basis to share their experiences of the pedagogy in action and to generate ideas for network building, research and dissemination. The Herstory team, in partnership with the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook, will provide mentoring and support for participants’ efforts to amplify the voices of the communities they have engaged and to increase the impact of their work with Herstory through publication, research, and public presentation opportunities.

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Requirements:

To ensure that each member is fully engaged and heard, and to replicate as nearly as possible the intimacy of in-person settings, it is essential for participants to be in a stationary location with a computer or tablet that always allows a full view of the other participants, cameras on, without multitasking.

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Prerequisites:

• A demonstrated interest in writing and in people and their stories. This will include a commitment to write one’s own memoir as part of the training practicum, in order to experience full immersion in the pedagogy.

• A strong desire to incorporate teaching in carceral, educational, community-based organization, advocacy and alternative settings into current and future life plans.

• A willingness to make a year commitment to the program to ensure that the projects developed are fully implemented.

• Written demonstration of support from a potential partner with the capacity to carry out the project.

• While experience in leading groups is not an absolute requirement, preference will be given to those who have had this experience.

• Agreement to officially join Herstory Writers Network.

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Selection Criteria:

Applicants will be judged based on how well their interests correspond to the goals of using guided memoir as a vehicle for personal and community empowerment, healing, and change, as well as their willingness to dedicate effort to this training program. Special consideration will be given to candidates working at the forefront of justice movements that center racial inequities, environment, carceral systems, public health, and disability, and other communities of healing in a world in distress. Speakers of other languages are encouraged to apply.

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To Apply:
Applications will be considered on a competitive basis in the order in which they are received. Training is offered to selected candidates free of charge. If you have any questions, please contact Herstory's artistic director, Erika Duncan at eduncan@herstorywriters.org, Herstory's assistant director Tammy Arnstein at tarnstein@herstorywriters.org, and Linda Migoya at lmigoya@herstorywriters.org. 

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Our previous cohorts of trainees have included a former director of the literature program of the National Endowment for the Arts, a professor of Mathematics from Queensboro Community College, a past president of New York State TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages), a retired elementary school principal, an army veteran medic, a director of a re-entry task force, a retiree from a long career in public health and nursing education, a filmmaker, several visual artists, organizational leaders, Dreamers, human rights activists, local and national fellows, and much more.

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In 2018 and 2019, through a special grant from the Regional Economic Development Council/ New York State Council on the Arts, we established a fellowship program for 6 Stony Brook graduate students in the Humanities, leading to new workshops in Spanish for Rural Migrant Ministry and extending our fastest growing program for young people who crossed the border by themselves, along with a now permanent disabilities program. In the fall of 2020, we joined forces with the Coalition for Community Writing to create a national fellowship program, leading to our first ever Herstory Mississippi Project, work with women and transgender folx experiencing homelessness in Denver, Colorado, a workshop for Syrian refugee women living in refugee camps in Lebanon, who were married before the age of 18, and a national/international writing project to (re)imagine mental health care.
 
Despite the wide variety in age, life trajectory and current student or employment status,  all have brought to our interviews a remarkably parallel wish: to go deeper into the work they are already doing with literature, community, empowerment and healing through engaging in our process and reaching the people who most need a voice at this time in history. All have come at a moment they define as a turning point in their lives,  when they are seeking a new direction.     
 

If you are at a turning point in your life and feel that this could be a new direction for you, we invite you to join our first round of early applicants. We are particularly seeking speakers of other languages, with a large increase in the demand for new workshops for our immigrant students and community members. 
 

* Partnerships created by the fellows include workshops with women from Rural Migrant Ministries in Riverhead;  an "Abriendo Puertas" workshop for Head Start parents, a workshop at Hofstra University in which criminology students write side by side with people returning from prison, a workshop at Stony Brook University in which female veterans write side by side with students seeking the missing pages in the Literature of War. 

To meet our 2022-2023 Fellows, click here.