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 Hames Scholarship
- The Lane Goddard Scholarship
- The Mary Simmerling Survivors’s Voices Scholarship
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 Mary Simmering Survivors Voices Scholarship was funded by an initial donation in honor of Thomas Epting’s mother, Cynthia Hanegan, who did not survive to tell her story.
This fund helps to empower survivors to reclaim their stories and so too their power.
As a survivor of sexual violence, Mary Simmering knows first hand the healing powers of writing, both alone and with others. As an Amherst Writers & Artists (AWA) writing workshop facilitator and participant, she also believes in the incredible power of the AWA method. This fund seeks to expand the reach of the AWA method and writing workshops to include more people who identify as survivors of sexual violence and want to write together in community with other survivors. To write where we belong.
Through participating in AWA workshops, many survivors come to realize that we are not defined by what has happened to us, but rather that we — and we alone — have the power to make our own meaning of our experiences. And this idea — that we alone are in control of deciding how we will incorporate and give meaning to our life experiences and share our stories — has the potential to shift the locus of control not only of our individual but also our communal stories in powerfully disruptive ways. We have the power to take back and own our own stories. And in so doing, we can bring to light some of the many harms associated with victim-blaming mythologies that further disempower survivors. These include questions and comments that falsely suggest that the victims themselves rather than perpetrators are responsible.
As Pat Schneider wrote, “In writing, we see, sometimes with fear and trembling, who we have been, who we really are, and we glimpse now and then who we might become.”
To learn more about the transformational power of participating in AWA writing workshops for sexual assault survivors, please read this USA Today article: “Rape survivors share works of healing, self-compassion in new book,” this editorial: “Transforming trauma into stories of hope, healing, and resistance,” or this Survivor Voices story. If you are interested in reading stories from survivors while also supporting AWA and RAINN, please consider purchasing this anthology of survivors’ stories that were shared and written in AWA workshops over the course of the last two years.