The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2022 Winter Literature Grant to Antoinette Cooper for her upcoming book UNRULY.

Antoinette Cooper (we/us) is a writer, rainmaker, TEDx speaker, and founder of Black Exhale, a space for the liberated Black body. She’s committed to healing collective trauma through the arts, ancestral healing, and medical humanities.
Understanding that there’s no separation between all the realms of the body, earth, and the arts, her work explores the intersections of these multiple dimensions. She’s taught at Columbia, CUNY School of Medicine; and has led writing workshops from The Metropolitan Museum of Art to Rikers Island Correctional Facility. She holds a B.A. from Cornell, an MFA from Columbia, and sits on the board of Narrative Medicine at CUNY School of Medicine.

For centuries the Black body has been at the center of conflict. Nations have warred over its dominion and called themselves master. Legal, social, financial, medical, and countless more systems have been created to consistently undermine the sovereignty of the Black body. We have been chattel, currency, subject and subjected to. Whether or not Critical Race Theory continues to be debated, or whether history books candidly show, our DNA holds the story of the violences we’ve survived and are surviving. The body always remembers; this is the nature of trauma.

In UNRULY, a multi-genre collection by Antoinette Cooper, the Black body is given voice because there’s much to tell and many ways to do the telling. It all starts with the Black body and Antoinette explores the landscape of the Black female body through multiple narratives—medical, historical, contemporary social justice, and the personal. This exploration began when after decades of symptoms, doctors had finally given her a diagnosis as she was preparing for life-saving surgery. This brought her to the mothers of gynecology and the overwhelming presence of the collective pain body. Through documentary poetry, prose, medical narrative and images, UNRULY goes on to diagnose anti-Blackness in the larger systems as a leading factor in Antoinette’s health challenges as a Black woman and invites readers to be a witness without censoring the body, and a participant in the process of reclamation and reparation.

When Antoinette isn’t writing she’s leading workshops, performing on a stage, or organizing. Two upcoming projects she’s most excited about is as writing coach and performer in Wild Darlings Sing the Blues, a ceremony and film on a former Southern plantation, and curating The Black Exhale Nest, a sanctuary space for Black men impacted by the criminal justice system.

For more information on Antoinette please visit her Instagram, Facebook and website.