intimate look at pathways to violence and post traumatic growth. Her personal essays and nonfiction have appeared in Ebony Magazine, The Root, Human Parts, and The Huffington Post. Her short story, “The Lucky Ones,” is featured in Midnight & Indigo issue 7, and her personal essay “Baby Butterflies” appears in the anthology collection Black Fire This Time.  Herina was a 2014 Hurston/Wright Fellow, a 2018 Summer Literary Seminar Fellow, and the 2019 winner of NYUs Threesis Academic Challenge where she discussed her completed manuscript that centers on themes of victim and perpetrator, childhood trauma, and redemption.

Herina holds a Master’s in Clinical Counseling for Mental Health and Wellness, an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU, and an MPhil in Criminological Research from the University of Manchester (UK).   She obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Psychology with a minor in investigative journalism. 

A dedicated and detail-oriented higher education administrator, she spent nearly a decade in academic administration and program management. As the Assistant Director of NYU Meyer’s Nursing Research program, she enhanced faculty and student relationships, streamlined operations, and implemented strategic initiatives that drove institutional effectiveness. She has a strong track record of supporting graduate students, and providing operational leadership across admissions, curriculum coordination, and academic events. She is adept at navigating institutional change and leveraging data-driven decision-making and committed to advancing equity, excellence, and innovation in education.

In her role as a psychotherapist, Herina provides therapy for individuals that seek to have a more fulfilling life, including but not limited to those who have experienced involvement with the criminal justice system. Her clients include formerly incarcerated individuals, and those under the surveillance mechanisms of parole, probation, and other forms of community supervision. She assists those that have difficulty with chronic anger, sadness, those that worry too often, those struggling with unsatisfying relationships, individuals who want to explore self actualization, those in the midst of grief or loss, and those managing the intersection of marginalized identities.

She provides a safe and warm space to unpack and dissect emotions and cognitions, using an integration of Compassion-Focused (CFT) psychodynamic, and Gestalt therapies. Emergent psychotherapy approaches such as vipassana meditation, Narrative Therapy, Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT), and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) are meant to increase self awareness and thus positively influence compassion for the self and for others. She uses her expertise to carefully and respectfully help individuals develop insight around unconscious processes, past patterns, relationship trends, and current behaviors.

Herina is developing a research proposal on the role of shame and negative self concept in persistence/desistance from crime that may have implications for psychotherapy approaches to treatment. In previous roles, she has interfaced with at-risk young adult men and ex-offenders, first in a prison reentry organization called Project Renewal, and later at a New York City based prison advocacy organization called The Correctional Association of New York, and an OMH mental health clinic called Shiloh.