Our Impact

Herstory became part of Laura Mullen’s’ life in 2019 while she was incarcerated at Yaphank Correctional Facility. She remembers that chapter in her life as dark and painful, until she began attending a Herstory workshop.

“I was writing in a place where people in dark suits with weapons and cold stares reminded you of your lack of freedom. I would sit with myself and write for days in my black and white marble notebooks, eager to share my writings at the next Herstory meeting. I discovered that I could write, and, importantly, how much I loved it, and when writing, I felt free.”

Laura walked out of prison in 2020 with purpose and self-confidence, fiercely determined to uplift others who were fighting battles that she had survived. She is now a leader in the movement to end human trafficking, working as the Anti-Human Trafficking Coordinator at ECLI-VIBES, and serving as the Co-Founder and President of its Survivor Advisory Board. This past summer, Laura trained to become a Herstory facilitator and now co-leads a writing workshop at ECLI-VIBES for survivors of human trafficking and gender-based violence.

Writing was how Laura broke her silence, healed, and set herself free, becoming a powerful voice in the movement to end human trafficking. Today she is paying it forward, guiding other women on their own journeys toward healing, transformation, and self-determination.

Kris Janvier discovered the power of his voice through Herstory.

In 2013, when he found out that there was a Herstory workshop for Hempstead High School students, he knew he had to find a way to join. Each week he would board the school bus with a small cohort of fellow students, to write side by side with students of criminology, social work and education at Hofstra University. His family recognized that he had a gift for writing poetry and he was excited to see where it would take him, little dreaming that within the next ten years he would be an established poet.

Upon his graduation, as a new college student with a lot on his plate, he knew he had to find Herstory again. Based on his gifts and amazing perseverance, the director of SUNY Old Westbury’s Community Action, Learning, and Leadership Program created a credit bearing independent study opportunity for him to attend the newly formed community workshop around racial justice at the Yes We Can Center in the New Cassel section of Westbury, a community started centuries earlier by freed slaves. There he started “The Age of Legality,” a stunning memoir about family love in the face of poverty and hunger, with unforgettable images of Hempstead’s beauty of spirit, its streets and its people, its struggles and strength. With each new delivery, he built upon his native Creole rhythms, turning it into a spoken word masterpiece—Herstory’s first of this genre.  

He challenged the accomplished human service and human rights leaders in his workshop, who were training to work in the high schools, to unpack subtle parts of the Herstory pedagogy no one else had been able to articulate before.  

“Being in the workshop, I felt like I was getting paid, but it wasn’t money I was getting.” Whenever there was a Herstory reading, Kris would be featured, whether it took place in a college gymnasium or auditorium, a gathering of politicians, or a poetry centered event. He would always begin his reading in the same way: 

“I am still psychologically infected this semester. Why? Because waking up every morning feeling ready and steady, performing personal hygiene to be clean, wearing wrinkled clothes, looking back and forth at the digital clock from the Cablevision cable box only to manage time to eat breakfast.”  

Although breakfast was not always forthcoming.

He would perform the entire piece from memory, building upon the experience of student hunger, which few others dared to touch upon. Erika Duncan, Herstory’s Founder and Director, recalls long lines of students with tears in their eyes waiting to shake his hand or to invite him to join clubs working on food and housing justice, so that quickly he became famous. 

Click here to read Kris's whole piece.

Kris described the pressures of being a first-generation American carrying the weight of his mother’s vision of the American dream on his shoulders, yet he was uncertain he could, or even wanted to, fulfill this predetermined path. He wrote, “The more I thought about it, the more apathetic I would be.” 

That apathy was short-lived; in reading his work publicly, his gift was revealed. His power increased with each new delivery, and people noticed. He discovered that he could make an emotional connection with audiences; more and more he wanted to be in that space. “Something within me said I could go far with this,” he remembered. At one event, the poet laureate of Nassau County invited him into his network of performers, and soon Kris was regularly attending open mics, readings, and festivals. Kris no longer felt directionless or unsure of who he was. It was in the merging of memoir and poetry that he first found his calling.

Kris remained with Herstory until 2017 and considers those workshops essential to his journey. Today he performs at open mic nights across Long Island and NYC. He has self-published three poetry collections, including his Drift Series on Amazon, contributes to The Scene Magazine, an online zine celebrating LI and NYC poets, and is active in the Multicultural Council of NY, championing diversity through art and culture.

Bea Gravino once made a confession: “I never thought I’d be the mother I’ve become.”

Bea discovered that writing with Herstory was like “lifting a veil,” helping her see her journey parenting an autistic child in a new light and replacing years of self‑doubt with the realization that she had always been an exceptional mother. When Bea joined Herstory in 2005, she began exploring the fear, exhaustion, and uncertainty that had gripped her as she refused to accept the predictions of clinicians that her daughter Amy’s life would be limited, helping her look back on the early years of her journey parenting a child with autism in a new light. This process also allowed Bea to celebrate all that her daughter had achieved through her own refusal to accept the words of so-called “experts” that Amy would only ever work in a sheltered workshop, living a life without meaning.

Yet by the time Amy joined the same writing circle as Bea a few years later, she was already a prolific young writer and sought after professional speaker. Through Herstory, both mother and daughter experienced profound transformation.

When Amy was a child, writing became her survival mechanism, authoring countless poems and letters to her parents, to her classmates, and to God, all rife with pain. She carried memories of being misunderstood and dismissed by teachers and clinical professionals, and of the taunting she experienced at hands of classmates, one of whom even told her that God wanted her dead. Writing was how she tenuously, desperately held onto the world.

Thanks to Herstory’s empathy-based method of writing in community, Amy’s writing shifted from a way surviving to a way of thriving. Amy began to process and work through the memories she had once only endured. “Owning your own life,” she reflected, “you have to own everything you went through.” That, she said, was the gift Herstory gave her. [Read one of Amy's short memoirs, The Naughty Autie, to see how she succeeded in owning both her pain and joy in one piece of writing].

Bea’s own memoir began with post-partum depression and a refusal to accept her daughter’s grim prognosis of a lifetime of limitations. She further detailed her inability to imagine that the young Amy would grow into a gifted writer, autism advocate, and public speaker, sharing her voice on national platforms such as TEDx and at the United Nations. Still, as she heard Amy’s telling of her torment as a child, she ached for her daughter.

For Amy, listening to her mother’s writing revealed how deeply Bea’s life had been all consumed by caring and fighting for her. The discomfort they experienced in hearing each other’s truths come alive on the page was real, but focusing on the writing itself, each from the intimate perspective of the storyteller, was where overcoming the pain began. Writing together in community, the Herstory way, brought them closer in ways neither one expected.

Bea summed it up this way: “It was a treat, not a treatment.”