About the Book
A stunning lyrical commentary on the constructions of race, gender, and class in the fraught nexus of a Black woman's personal experience and cultural history
The Fair Housing Act passed in 1968, and more than fifty years later, yours seems to be the only Black family on your block in Minneapolis. You and your Black African husband, both college graduates, make less money than some White people with a felony record and no high school diploma. You're the only Black student in your graduate program. You just aren't working hard enough. You're too sensitive. Sandra Bland? George Floyd? Don't take everything so personally. Amid the White smiles of Minnesota Nice and the Minnesota Paradox-the insidious racism of an ostensibly inclusive place to live-what do you do? If you're Taiyon J. Coleman, you write.
In Traveling without Moving, Coleman shares intimate essays from her life: her childhood in Chicago-growing up in poverty with four siblings and a single mother-and the empowering decision to leave her first marriage. She writes about being the only Black student in a prestigious and predominantly White creative writing program, about institutional racism and implicit bias in writing instruction, about the violent legacies of racism in the U.S. housing market, about the maternal health disparities seen across the country and their implication in her own miscarriage. She explores what it means to write her story and that of her family-an act at once a responsibility and a privilege-bringing forth the inherent contradictions between American ideals and Black reality.
Using a powerful blend of perspectives that move between a first-person lens of lived experience and a wider-ranging critique of U.S. culture, policy, and academia, Coleman's writing evinces how a Black woman in America is always on the run, always Harriet Tubman, traveling with her babies in tow, seeking safety, desperate to survive, thrive, and finally find freedom.
Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.
Table of Contents:
Contents
Introduction: Mind the Gap
The Thenar Space
Fool’s Gold
Grown Folks’ Business
Poems as a Mapping of Human Potential
Disparate Impacts: Moving to Minnesota to Live Just Enough for the City
The Dangers of Teaching Writing While Black
Tilted Uterus: When Jesus Is Your Baby Daddy
Making the Invisible Visible: Mapping Racial Housing Covenants in South Minneapolis
What’s Understood Don’t Need to Be Explained
You Can Miss Me with That, ’Cause Plantations Were Diverse, Too
Sometimes I Feel like Harriet Tubman
Acknowledgments
References
Publication History
About the Author :
Taiyon J. Coleman is a poet, writer, and educator whose work has been anthologized widely. A Cave Canem and VONA fellow, she is a 2017 recipient of a McKnight Foundation Artist Fellowship in Creative Prose and is one of twelve emerging children's writers of color selected as a recipient of the 20182019 Mirrors and Windows Fellowship funded by the Loft Literary Center and the Jerome Foundation in Minnesota. She is associate professor of English and women's studies at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Review :
"Hope is a nest of yellowjackets in this collection of personal essays. Taiyon J. Coleman hammers the page to make sense of a world that refuses to make sense of her. She writes into the break and the crack and the tectonic plates of love and loss. The searchlights of institutional racism follow everybody home. Everybody. Even the noodles in the bowl look like the n-word tied to the entire neck of the graduate class she will not be unseen in. This is a book to have and to hold."-Nikky Finney, author of Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry
"Traveling without Moving is a powerful reclamation of the past. Taiyon J. Coleman courageously adventures through time to explore and bring back the pieces of herself that this country and its racist institutions and populations have worked tirelessly to demolish. This book is a statement of truth to power, to the world beyond this one, and to the spirits waiting to enter."-Kao Kalia Yang, author of Somewhere in the Unknown World: A Collective Refugee Memoir
"Taiyon J. Coleman has beautifully captured the intense vitality of a young and gifted Black girl who faces innumerable obstacles to fulfilling her dreams of becoming a writer and artist. Her unquenchable desire to live as a grown and accomplished Black woman and mother on her own terms, while fighting to heal from collective and familial traumas, will resonate with anyone who has had to strive mightily to prove others wrong to fulfill their potential. Traveling without Moving is a feast of growing up within multiple generations and spaces of Black culture, with humor, determination, loss, sorrow, originality, hope, and, above all, an invitation to embrace possibility."-Sun Yung Shin, author of The Wet Hex
"In Traveling without Moving, Taiyon J. Coleman charts a path to a life of creative expression with the maps she received and remade to navigate race, gender, and class in America. Within this collection of personal essays tracing childhood to motherhood and education to instruction, Coleman’s love for the writing life resounds. Through writing, she breaks patterns of inherited silence and structural silencing. And yet, beyond an insistence on survival and a celebration of voice, Traveling without Moving is an offering to educators everywhere. In it, Coleman outlines the many ways that instructors can recognize and subvert institutional patterns of exclusion with curiosity, by asking questions. In doing so, Coleman takes up a radical task-what Felicia Rose Chavez has called ‘resisting inheritance as default’-as she plots ways toward a more generous and generative culture where, in telling our stories, our maps for the possible expand."-Katherine Kassouf Cummings, coeditor of What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be?
"The result of [Coleman’s] diligent work is this ebullient, insightful, frank, and humorous essay collection suffused with a joyful defiance; ultimately, it reads like a well-deserved celebration of Coleman’s many personal and professional triumphs."-Kirkus Reviews
"[Coleman’s] essays speak a powerful truth in regard to the disparities faced not only by a Black woman in housing, medical care, employment, and education, but by marginalized communities as a whole."-Insight News
"Coleman’s calling as a poet and educator shines through in her intelligent probing of her lived realities as they collide with structural racism, classism, and gender biases."-Colors of Influence
"[Traveling Without Moving] is a feat of literary abracadabra, transforming itself from a series of recursive essays into a memoir, in condensed form, right before the reader’s eyes."-Great Lakes Review
"You’ll...particularly enjoy Coleman’s style: it’s conversational with plenty of asides, like talking with a friend – but it’s also pay-attention serious and you’ll like that, too. [Traveling Without Moving] is a quick and forward read."-Caribbean Life
