This meditation on buttercups seen from behind prison bars becomes a cry against shackling, violating and labeling all that is vulnerable and free. Startling in its beauty, but also its stridency against violation of women and nature, it takes the listener into the snake-pit where women turn against one another instead of being able to see one another’s souls, crying out against the inhumanity of locking away those who really need healing and another kind of aid toward finding the freedom of a buttercup blowing in the wind. In the interview that surrounds the meditation, radio talk show host and Herstory facilitator Silvia Heredia, who teaches two workshops a week for incarcerated teen girls and one workshop for incarcerated women, while facilitating several bridge programs involving students of criminology and psychology in writing side by side with girls caught in the “school to prison pipeline," joins Lila Grace (a pen name) in talking through the hard issues of the increase of incarceration of women in this county and its ramifications. The interview revolves around Lila’s work with the Herstory project’s restorative justice initiative, conceived and implemented by founder and artistic director Erika Duncan, which gives formerly incarcerated women the change to read in a wide variety of settings, colleges, universities and consortiums of agencies within the system, where their writings might change not only hearts and minds, but contribute to different outcomes in the laws that put women and girls caught in cycles of addiction, violence, poverty and abuse behind bars. Lila talks movingly about her experiences reading her work to current and future decision makers (the core of the project), and especially to the officers from the two correctional facilities where she was once incarcerated, who became instrumental in bringing Herstory’s book of prison writings, VOICES, to the corrections academy, where it is now required reading for every officer in training who graduates from the academy. 
The youth branch of Herstory’s “Writing for Justice and Racial Equality” is supported by two grants from the MS Foundation for Women and from Ben and Jerry’s Foundation, with organizational and conceptual assistance coming through the Nassau County Youth Board. For more information about the project contact Erika Duncan at eduncan@Herstorywriters.org or visit Herstory’s website at www.herstorywriters.org
This program, half in Spanish, half in English, creates another kind of bridge through translation and is easily accessible to speakers of either language.


Herstory Writers Workshop is following