Herstory Writers Network
Partner
PHONE: +1(631) 676-7395
Twenty-five years ago, novelist and essayist Erika Duncan gathered a small group of women who had never written for an audience, with the mission of writing their life stories in a way that would stir identification, empathy, and compassion in even the hardest-hearted stranger. Together, the women joined Erika in designing a new set of tools that could allow anyone—regardless of their level of education or previous writing experience—to partake in the process, working side by side across the differences in race, class, and culture that keep us apart. And so Herstory Writers Workshop was born, with a groundbreaking mission of shifting the power structure so that those whose voices had been silenced would have a place in the decision-making that affects their lives. The organization anticipates using a combination of online, in-person, and hybrid models to continue gathering stories from near and far that shed a personal and compelling light on systems that have failed the writer, injustices faced or observed, families torn apart, and the consequences of poverty and hopelessness. Many of the stories that emerge from Herstory workshops become instruments of change.
Founder Erika Duncan
There has never been a time when Herstory’s founder and artistic director Erika Duncan wasn’t doing what she could to give voice to stories that might not otherwise have been heard. Her early novels, A Wreath of Pale White Roses and Those Giants: Let them Rise, look at those who are trying to break out of silence and fear, while her portraits of writers (written when she was a contributing editor for Book Forum and collected in Unless Soul Clap its Hands: Portraits and Passages) touch on whatever brought each into voice. This search is picked up in her front page series for the New York Times Long Island Weekly, where for four years her portraits of Long Island writers, artists and musicians, thinkers, dreamers and doers appeared every month. She has published numerous articles in various journals and anthologies, among them explorations of mother/daughter and sister relationships, the art of effective listening and works about teaching writing.