Writing the Body with Antoinette Cooper

Twenty Summers

A writing workshop, poetry discussion, and contemplative practice. “I write the body, yet once someone attempted to correct my English to say that I must have meant that I write about the body. No. I give the body voice. Or rather, I honor that the body innately has voice and create the conditions that allow me to connect to that voice. This embodied journey can then expand until I touch the ancestral edges of myself to find the stories embedded in my DNA. And if I am willing to continue the journey, I can gently brush against the voice of collective bodies that often feel like wind, or the storms. There were stories buried in the tumor that the doctors cut out of me. There are generations worth of stories that have yet to be told, that do not know how to be told, and even when told, have no witness for the telling. The body has infinite stories to tell, and as one who moves through the world in a Black female body, writing her is an act of reclamation. As one who occupies a world built on the exploitation of our Black bodies, writing us is an act of reparation. As one who has disembodied often in order to survive, writing the body is an act of love. Black notions of resistance and fugitivity include the retention of memory.” Antoinette Cooper is a writer, rainmaker and TEDx speaker committed to the liberation of Black bodies through the arts, ancestral healing, social justice, and medical humanities. She was born on the island of Jamaica, and raised on the island of New York in the New York City Housing Projects. She holds a B.A. from Cornell University, a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University, and sits on the board of Narrative Medicine at CUNY School of Medicine. She understands that there is no separation between all the realms of the body, the earth, and the arts so her work explores the intersections of these multiple dimensions. She is currently at work publishing a multi-genre collection that documents the historical and present day violences on the Black female body.