Can we write ourselves free?
I always thought so. When I was a child, lacking in courage and afraid of an audience I would speak to myself in the mirror, and I fancied myself free. When I was a woman, lacking in courage and afraid of my own wounds I would write on a page, and I fancied myself free. Freedom never looked the same on me. Always changing its coats. I was always writing, and speaking, and singing to catch a glimpse of that freedom.
The focus isn’t on the writing though, because form is no never mind. The focus is on the incantation, the world building with words, the creation, the alchemy. The focus is on the silences, the cracks, the obfuscations, the erasures, and what needs to be brought out of the shadows. The focus is on the inability to focus, the vastness of the experiences that make up what it means to be—and then to be free.
I would write so incessantly that there is a piece of pencil lead lodged in both the thumb of my left hand, and the palm of my right hand. Writing is in my blood, literally. Perhaps it is this access to what it means to be free that had literacy deemed a crime for Black peoples during enslavement. I am forever a fugitive.
Read my latest writing on Substack: Antoinette Cooper Writes, where I write toward freedom, one week at a time.
Publications
Eve writes a love letter to a mustard seed — Opening poem for The Pocket Project's Climate Consciousness Summit
Writing the Body, a Learning Prompt and prose essay — Poetry Foundation
The Metamorphosis (or Phronesis) — Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine
After Breonna — The Amistad Literary Arts Journal
Artist Residencies
LMCC Workspace Residency. Nine months of studio time that taught me how to build in the dark.
20 Summers Fellowship. A barn in Provincetown, a cohort of creators, and permission to incubate.
BLKSPACE at Ryder Farm. Black artists. Black time. Black cuisine. The freedom breathed differently here.
Articles + Interviews
Liberating and Healing the Body Through Writing, The Provincetown INDEPENDENT
Literature Grant 2022 Winter Grantee: Antoinette Cooper, Café Royal Cultural Foundation, NYC
Women Who Write: Antoinette Bumekpor [sic], Interviewed by Paulina Pinksy, Columbia Journal
Poetry Student Antoinette Bumekpor [sic] Tackles Chronic Illness Through Writing, Columbia University School of the Arts
Columbia MFA in Writing, Columbia University School of the Arts
Antoinette Bumekpor [sic] and the Writing Program, Columbia University School of the Arts
breaking
blooming
healing
fully clothed in skin