Narrative Acts / Community Action

Join us for our next Narrative Acts/Community Action event, where Narrative Medicine faculty Samantha Barrick and author-facilitator Antoinette Cooper examine what it means to practice care in a nation built on wounding. Diagnosing our collective toxicology and prescribing ceremony over clinical distance, they ask: what scaffolding does dignity require? What structures must we build to tend to each other?

Narrative Acts/Community Action is a new narrative medicine virtual series to engage with our alumni, faculty and the global community as we explore through their work ways the humanities and creative arts are an actionable path toward community-centered change and responding to difficult times. Together we seek to find inspiration in the humanities and creative arts as individual and collective means to help navigate uncertain times through self-reflection and processing, advocacy and visibility, and connection with others. 

Samantha Barrick is the Director of Humanities in Medicine at the CUNY School of Medicine and Affiliate faculty in the Narrative Medicine Program at Columbia University. She is a poet, mother, writer and educator who publishes in diverse mediums including poetry, memoir, popular media, social criticism, and academic essay in places including Literature & Medicine, The Intima, Mutha Magazine, The Philadelphia City Paper, Off Our Backs, Lesbian Nation, Moonstone’s Poetry Ink, Helmet Hair and Medical Education. Her hybrid poetry memoir GRIT and tender membrane was published by plan B and her work was anthologized in Queering Sexual Violence: Radical voices from within the anti-sexual violence movement.

Antoinette Cooper is a poet, educator, and collective trauma facilitator working at the intersections of narrative medicine, social justice, and ancestral healing. Author of UNRULY (Legacy Book Press, 2025), which became an Amazon Poetry Bestseller and has been endorsed by luminaries including historian Deirdre Cooper Owens and international trauma specialist Thomas Hübl, PhD. As founder of Black Exhale, Cooper creates sanctuary spaces focused on healing intergenerational trauma through culturally competent, trauma-informed community care. Her flagship Reparations Café program has been presented at the UN Permanent Forum on People of African Descent, offering decolonial healing practices to both policy makers and grassroots leaders. Cooper brings over two decades of educational experience across diverse settings—from Oakland public schools to Columbia University, from Rikers Island to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Having served on the Advisory Board for the Narrative Medicine Track of Distinction at CUNY School of Medicine, she provided oversight on programmatic design that centered collective healing through an ancestral health and social justice lens. Her recent work includes installations at the Met Staff Art Show and LMCC Open Studios, her TEDx talk "Death by Chocolate Cyst: If My Illness Had a Voice," and publications in Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine. A certified Collective Trauma Facilitator trained with Thomas Hübl's Academy of Inner Science, Cooper embodies the belief that "The Black body was created to be loved," using art, education, and embodied practices as tools for individual and collective liberation.

Narrative Acts/Community Action will be a special, intermittently recurring event hosted by the Division of Narrative Medicine in the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. Narrative Acts/Community Actions is 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. This event will not be recorded for reasons of privacy.