Meet Antoinette.

Antoinette Cooper creates conditions for collective healing through poetry, facilitation, and embodied practice. Over more than two decades, her work has moved across stages, classrooms, altars, and institutions—where ancestral wisdom, artistic rigor, and community care converge.

She is the founder of Black Exhale, a nonprofit creating sanctuary for the liberated Black body, and author of UNRULY (Legacy Book Press, 2025), a documentary poetry collection excavating Black women's experiences with medical racism, bodily autonomy, and ancestral healing. She writes weekly on Substack, living and archiving her devotion to being free.

Antoinette has presented at TEDx, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the Poetry Foundation, and institutions including Columbia University, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, and Rikers Island Jail Facility. Her writing has appeared in The Amistad Literary Arts Journal, Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, and Baobab: South African Journal of New Writing. She’s been featured on the Epidemic//Endemic web series by the Johns Hopkins Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine.

She holds an MFA in Writing from Columbia University and a BA from Cornell University, with advanced training in collective trauma, somatic practice, and narrative medicine. She serves on the advisory board for the Narrative Medicine Track of Distinction at CUNY School of Medicine.

Antoinette has received grants from NYSCA, LMCC, and Café Royal Cultural Foundation, and residencies from Twenty Summers, BLKSPACE, and the LMCC Workspace Residency. In 2026, she received the LEADers Impact Award for Arts & Culture from LVMH's Employee Resource Group for African Descent.