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 right 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 bodies during enslavement. I am forever a fugitive.
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 (Lower Manhattan Cultural Council), is a nine-month studio-based program that focuses on the creative process and cohort development of artists.
20 Summers Fellowship. Each season, a cohort of diverse creatives are invited to join us in Provincetown, MA at the Hawthorne Barn, to explore, to incubate original work and to "imagine a more equitable and sustainable future, Twenty Summers from today.”
BLKSPACE residency, on Ryder Farm, gives Black artists, activists, and organizers time and space to work towards Black liberation.
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