Fellowhips & Interships

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Herstory Beyond Bars
National Fellowship Program

This national program, designed for competitively selected fellows working on cutting-edge projects, combines a master writing workshop, think tank, and innovative way of using stories in the carceral justice arena. 2024-25 fellows include a religion professor working with men on death row in Tennessee, men from an organization of formerly incarcerated teachers who have developed curriculum juxtaposing Shakespeare monologues with their personal monologues, and members of prison families young and old. In weekly practicum meetings, the fellows read aloud and advance their own memoirs in progress while expanding and questioning the discourse around restorative justice, accountability, moral judgment, forgiveness, and criminalization itself. All fellows are charged with further developing and refining Herstory’s Beyond Bars online curriculum to make it as effective as possible for use behind and beyond bars, with the goal of creating new literary works that will serve as calls to action, raise public awareness, and foster dialogue about systemic change.

MSW Social Justice Fellowship

Affectionately dubbed by participating fellows the “Jump Up and Speak Loudly” fellowship, Herstory’s competitive yearlong program for advanced MSW candidates offers five social work students per year the opportunity to participate in “Change is Coming: Social Workers at the Forefront” in Wyandanch, NY. After intensive training in Herstory pedagogy, fellows find their own voice to heal, grow, and transform past traumas into opportunities to give back to the larger community. They then engage in field work in a school or community setting in the underserved community of Wyandanch, where they use guided memoir writing to help clients and communities speak their truths, with the overarching goal of contributing meaningfully to community action and change, as well as the field of social work.

Jacob Volkma
Human Rights Fellowship

This fellowship is focused on encouraging activism across the generations to respond to the most urgent needs of our time by bringing together elders dedicated to social justice and young, emerging activists–incarcerated and free. The fellowship is awarded to people who are taking a leadership role in the creation of intergenerational writing circles across the nation with the goal of bridging the racial, ethnic, cultural, educational, and economic divides that too often keep us from hearing one another. Established in 2021 by Jacob Volkman’s descendants in memory of the father of Herstory’s founder and director, Erika Duncan, the fellowship honors Volkman’s lifelong dedication to workers’ rights, human rights, fair housing, and racial justice.

Adrián Pérez Melgosa
Stories for Our Time
Internship Program

Renamed in honor of the late visionary director of the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook University, this program offers between 20 and 60 yearly internships in which students apply public humanities to bridge the gap between campus and community through intergenerational online writing circles. Themes have included “Awakenings: Protest Movements for Our Time,” “From Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter,” “Re-Imagining Mental Health Care,” and “Shaping Spaces: Disability Stories to Create a Movement.” Since its inauguration during the pandemic years, around Pérez Melgosa’s theme of “Healing, Resilience, and Survival,” this program has changed the lives of scores of young people, allowing them to integrate their academic studies into the larger search for meaning in community. Here students have the chance to write alongside people like US civil rights leaders now in their 80s, the son of a sharecropper from Arkansas, people forcibly committed to mental institutions, and people with disabilities, as together they forge new paths for equity and inclusion. Numerous graduates from this program continue to work with Herstory in the schools and the courts.

Linda Howard Weissman
Pro Bono Law Internship Program

This program was named in honor of the late Linda Howard Weissman, a Herstory board member who was Assistant Dean for Institutional Advancement at Touro Law Center for nearly 30 years. This internship provides an opportunity for Touro law students to write alongside court-involved youth in the same workshop, encouraging young people to find their voice in order to tell their stories and advocate for themselves. The internship strives to ensure that law students fulfill Weissman’s dream of lawyers expanding their skills to be able to help people involved in the criminal legal system tell their stories in ways that evoke empathy in those who have power over their lives. Through writing about racial and other structural injustices, young people in this program have the opportunity to dream new futures while challenging their parents, probation officers, and other decision makers to change the patterns and systems of violence, punishment, and revenge that have shaped them.