December Narrative Medicine Rounds with Antoinette Cooper

For our December rounds, we have the pleasure of welcoming Antoinette Cooper, a visionary writer, TEDx speaker, Collective Trauma Facilitator, and founder of Black Exhale. Her work, featured in The Poetry Foundation, lntima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, and others, explores intersections of race, gender, health, and ancestral healing. Cooper holds an MFA from Columbia University and serves on the advisory board for CUNY's Narrative Medicine program. Her debut book of poetry, UNRULY, was published in 2025.

In Unruly, Antoinette Cooper weaves poetry, memoir, and documentary evidence into an ineffable work of embodied storytelling. UNRULY honors the Black female body as a site of profound resilience and complex histories.

With uncompromising honesty and lyrical precision, Cooper explores the intimate experiences of Black women-from historical medical abuses to contemporary health disparities, intergenerational trauma, societal beauty standards, and personal encounters with violence and healing. UNRULY refuses silence by (re)claiming our often unspoken and inviolable voice.

This revelatory reading experience, at once deeply personal and universally resonant, offers a nuanced exploration of how past and present intertwine in Black women's bodies. Cooper's genre-defying approach invites us to witness ancestral legacies while envisioning paths to integration and liberation, announcing her as an essential voice in contemporary literature. UNRULY offers language to articulate the full spectrum of Black women's embodied realities-in all their pain, power, and possibility.

Zahra H. Khan (she/her) is an educator and editor whose research, writing, and community engagement focus on facilitating critical consciousness in medical education and developing frameworks for abolitionist and healing-centered possibilities in health care. She is on the editorial board of Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, and a lecturer in the Graduate Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University. Zahra teaches courses exploring how the arts, humanities, and storytelling can be leveraged to address key issues impacting the health and safety of our most vulnerable communities, and how narrative can be a tool to drive meaningful action. She is the co-author of “Abolition Medicine” in The Lancet and “Abolitionist Reimaginings of Health” in the AMA Journal of Ethics, among other pieces. Zahra is currently the Storytelling and Media Producer at Interrupting Criminalization, leading the Beyond Do No Harm national storytelling project, which amplifies the stories of health care providers interrupting criminalization in health care. 

Narrative Medicine Rounds are monthly rounds held on the first Wednesday of the month during the academic year, hosted by the Division of Narrative Medicine in the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. Rounds are supported by live captioning. If you have any other accessibility needs or concerns, please contact the Office of Disability Services at 212-854-2388 or disability@columbia.edu at least 10 days in advance of the event. We do our best to arrange accommodations received after this deadline but cannot guarantee them. A recording of our Virtual Narrative Medicine rounds is available following the live session on the Narrative Medicine YouTube channel, and you can watch other recent Rounds events there.