Herstory Events
Herstory hosts events throughout the year featuring stories written in our workshops. Ranging from our annual Freedom Forum bringing together voices from all over Long Island to themed special readings with community partners and culminating events hosted within our partnering schools, these events help Herstory writers reach new audiences with their memoirs.
Please join us for our upcoming in-person events on Long Island. More details to come.
Join our newsletter for up-to-date e-mails about upcoming events and workshops.
​In Life We Trust: Memoirs to Create a Movement
Presented by Hope and Resilience Long Island, Inc.
Date: August 8, 2026
Time: 4 pm
Location: Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the South Fork
977 Bridgehampton-Sag Harbor Turnpike
You are invited to join Herstory Writers Network and Hope and Resilience Long Island for an intimate memoir reading that celebrates survivorship and the triumph of the human spirit, as we raise our voices for community action and change.
As you listen to the stories of women who have been trafficked right here on Long Island, and of people of all generations and callings rising to throw off the chains of racism and hatred, incarceration and political and family violence, reading from Herstory Writers Network's 30th anniversary anthology, we ask you to daydream with us about what a world would look like if we could truly hear each of our stories, in the interconnected web of it all, with dignity, perseverance and peace.
This reading marks the start of an exciting new collaboration between Herstory Writers Network and Hope and Resilience Long Island, a local grassroots organization serving survivors of domestic abuse, sexual assault and human trafficking on the East End of Long Island.
Register below to reserve your seat and stand alongside survivors seeking safety and justice.
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2026 Freedom Forum
Date: October 3, 2026
Time: TBD
Location: Wyandanch Plaza
Upcoming Events
Freedom Forums
Herstory’s annual Freedom Forum, held outdoors at the Wyandanch Plaza on Long Island, uses memoir written in Herstory workshops in English, Spanish, and Haitian Creole to examine the cracks in the Liberty Bell and encourage audience members to take on the issues of our time through a collective call to action.
Lively and powerful, our Freedom Forum builds and celebrates community through a combination of readings, reflections, music, spoken word, and dance, inviting passersby and onlookers, as well as audience members, to join in and take action. Since 2018, Herstory has been the Long Island representative of the Freedom Forum project, launched by the National Parks of New York Harbor Conservancy to highlight and confront social inequities.
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Each year our Freedom Forum tackles a different theme, inspired by the stories written by court-involved youth, people in prison, students of all ages, and countless others who write in Herstory programs. Whether sharing a story of growing up with a parent in prison, crossing a border alone, living with toxic dumping in one’s neighborhood, or being trafficked as a young woman, Freedom Forum readers use their personal histories as acts of self-empowerment dedicated to both individual and community healing and to motivating others to take action to change the policies and practices of our time that do so much harm.
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Our Freedom Forums have led directly to other Herstory projects, including our work at the intersection of race and environmental justice, the publication of immigrant student narratives in our Brave Journeys anthology, and the celebration of student voices through the Elephant in the Room project, which focuses on issues students must now confront at a young age, such as gun violence.
Special Events
Readings
Herstory holds a variety of readings in collaboration with community partners based on themes that develop in our workshops. These events feature readings of memoir excerpts that speak to each other, exploring our unique experiences and the meaning we make from them, as well as the commonality that binds us together.
Culminating Events
Herstory's culminating events celebrate the memoirs written in our school and university workshops throughout the year. Culminating events are designed in collaboration with our educational partners and student writers to highlight their voices and the messages the writers want to share with the world. These culminating events invite other members of the school and community to hear excerpts of the memoirs produced through the workshops, and facilitate dialogue among the community about the issues that matter to these young writers.
Galas
Every couple of years, Herstory hosts a gala to celebrate the new memoirs written in our network, highlight new themes developing in our workshops, and reach out to interested community members and stakeholders.