Writing Our Bodies Into Being: Poetry, Somatics, & Meditation for Black Trans-Masculine Folk

Hosted by Imani Noel Ford

Sunday, October 11, 2026

4:00-6:00PM

Daya Bushwick

Sliding Scale: $10-15 (no one turned away for lack of funds)

Body Talks are workshops that employ Imani’s poetic approach to somatic healing grounded in creativity, mindfulness, movement, and more. Body Talks invite us into deeper intimacy with ourselves and other Body Talkers, grounding us in collective somatic healing intended to liberate us.

Inspired by mundane conversations with their black trans-masculine friends, Imani has realized that being black and trans-masculine often means engaging in "body horror," "self-love," and "self-care" from the place of corporal, social, cultural, and historical paradox. Through their responses to their friends, Imani realized that a space to facilitate these conversations and generate poems around this topic might be inspiring and resonant for them and their community. Poetry is a container to engage time and space otherwise; poetry might hold these complexities around the subconscious, dream state, illness, chronic pain, self-care & black masculinity, psychosocial experiences of medically transitioning (or not), and the somatic sensation of gaining (self-fashioning) a body through surgery and HRT, or "losing" one's body through natural change. This is Imani's way of Body Talking with other black trans-masculine folk, in a more formal setting, to reassess, through somatics, meditation, and poetry, what bodily autonomy truly means when change, as their bio mother once said, "is the only thing, in this lifetime, we can really count on." Imani will create a poetic container grounded in meditation, music, and co-regulatory somatic practices. From there, we will dive in and share what we write! 

Body Talks are educational spaces. We share ourselves, our creativity, and embodied wisdom as resources for collective mental and somatic liberation.