Herstory’s commitment to expand work with people in prisons and jails led to a groundbreaking partnership with Ivan Kilgore, who, while incarcerated, developed and facilitated a Herstory writing workshop series with 25 men serving life sentences without the possibility of parole in Yard A in California State Prison, Solano. After decades of facilitating writing workshops in prison, Ivan discovered the Herstory Beyond Bars curriculum, recognizing that the focus on creating empathy was the missing piece he needed to help incarcerated people heal themselves and mentor others. 

Herstory  worked with Ivan to design a unique 10-week curriculum to provide his existing support group, Lifers with Optimistic Progress (LWOP), with tools to transform judgment into compassion and empathy while encouraging reflection and responsibility. This collaboration involved engaging in weekly phone calls with Ivan through the prison’s restricted phone system, sharing with workshop participants hard copies of materials published on the Herstory Beyond Bars curriculum website, and producing supplementary exercises and activities to encourage participants to understand and begin to break the cycle that leads people to commit violent acts. The LWOP writers will be adding their own writings to an ever-expanding collection of empathy-based memoirs fostering reflection, responsibility, and restoration. These powerful narratives will become part of the "Writing Beyond the Prison" archive at the Stony Brook University library and their impact will be amplified through public events and curricular development projects coordinated through the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook.

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The work with Ivan led to Herstory providing one-on-one workshop facilitator training by phone to leaders of LWOP groups in all four Solano prison yards, with the goal of making this curriculum, along with the new stories and exercises that continue to be produced, available on Edovo, a prison-approved, self-paced learning platform. The overarching goal for both Herstory and Ivan is to extend this replication to prisons across the country.