AWA funds its financial assistance from three scholarship pools—which you can support via your donations!
If you’re interested in applying to receive assistance from one of the funds below, click here.
The Kate Hymes Scholarship honors Board Member Emeritus Kate Hymes and supports Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) trainees who need financial assistance.
Kate Hymes is a writer and poet living in New Paltz. She has led Wallkill Valley Writers workshops for over twenty years. Writers who have written with her have dubbed her the story doula. Her poems have been published in national and regional anthologies, most recently mightier: Poets for Social Justice, published by Calling All Poets, 2020. She is currently working on poems inspired by the history of people of African descent in New Paltz and Ulster County.
In a statement she shared as Ulster County Poet Laureate, Hymes writes, “I love poetry because it is accessible to everyone. A poem doesn’t require the time commitment of other art forms or writing genres. A five or ten-minute commitment can give the reader an experience so significant that the feeling of reading that poem, specific lines, or images will stay with the reader for a lifetime.” Hymes continues, “At present, my work focuses on the lives of free and enslaved people of African descent in New Paltz, New York. I hope to write poems that fill in the gaps left by government and church records. The lives of Black people in New Paltz, and Ulster County, are largely visible through a glass, darkly in local news clippings, and personal letters and diaries of the white community. I am inspired by lines from a Kwame Dawes poem, A Way of Seeing: No records, just smells of stories/passing through most tenuous links… I want to be a griot who writes poems and tells the stories that keep the ancestors alive.”
The Lane Goddard Scholarship honors Board Member Emeritus Lane Goddard. This fund supports anyone who needs aid to attend the training and fulfill transformative aspirations for themselves or their intended workshop populations.
Lane Goddard discovered the magic of the AWA workshop method in a 2006 workshop with Pat Schneider, and never looked back. She became a facilitator in 2009, and joined the board in 2012, serving as secretary/treasurer, vice-chair, and chair until her retirement in 2020. Her principal motivation for serving on the board, and for working with writers using the AWA method, is her abiding belief in the value of writing and the writing life–for writers as well as readers–and the great joy she finds in writing with others in this safe and liberating way.
Lane hosted twice-monthly AWA sessions for women in her home from 2009 through 2018; her occasional Free-Range Writers workshops meet in other places for six to eight weeks. In the early 2000s, as a writer of short fiction, she was competitively selected by Richard Bausch for the Heritage Writers Workshop at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. At present, she is edging toward the end of the first draft of a novel.
As co-founder, then sole owner, of LandaBooks, for more than twenty years she provided training in writing and related skills to adult employees of government agencies and private-industry organizations. A graduate of Duke University, she also holds an MA in English from the University of Florida, and has earned many postgraduate hours in counseling, and a few in business administration.
The Sue Reynolds Power of Story Scholarship supports aspiring Affiliates with a clear vision of the community they hope to serve who need financial assistance to attend AWA certification training.
AWA’s Power of Story workshops bring together people who share a common identity or lived experience—caregivers, teachers, people who are grieving or aging, members of BIPOC or LGBTQ communities, and others (the program is always growing). In these spaces, participants write among those who understand their perspective, supported by a community that values the insight born of shared experience.
This scholarship supports aspiring AWA Affiliates who have a clear vision of the community they hope to serve but need financial assistance to cover some or all of the costs of AWA certification training.
Sue Reynolds trained with Pat Schneider in 2002 and worked closely with her until Pat’s death in 2020. She became a trainer in the AWA method in 2012 and worked closely with Maureen Buchanan Jones for years. Sue joined the board in 2014, and served for 10 years; the last 4 years she served as Chair, taking over from Lane Goddard after Lane stepped down. She has served on many committees in many capacities: Write Around the World, Marketing and Communications, Programming, Power of Story, Fundraising, Budgeting and Finance, Membership Outreach Retention and Support, and AWA Press.