Taiyon J. Coleman’s book Traveling without Moving: Essays from a Black Woman Trying to Survive in America is a collection of essays that helps us understand the inherent contradictions between American ideals and Black reality.
Coleman shares intimate stories from her life. She grew up in poverty in Chicago, experienced institutional racism and implicit bias in writing instruction contexts, has witnessed the violent legacies of racism in the United States housing market, maternal health disparities across the country and even the implications of these disparities in terms of her own miscarriage.
She explores what it means to write her story and the story of her family as an act of both privilege and responsibility and brings forth the inherent contradictions between American ideals and Black reality.
Coleman believes that a Black woman in America is always on the run—is always Harriet Tubman traveling with her babies in tow, seeking out safety, desperate to survive, to thrive and to finally find freedom.
The essays in Traveling Without Moving do what the best nonfiction does. They take the specific moments from a life and present them in ways that truly resonate, most especially with anyone who has had to work hard to succeed, anyone who has carried the wounds of childhood and used them to fortify their determination along life’s sometimes treacherous paths.
Bio: Taiyon J. Coleman, MFA, PhD, is the Dean of Liberal Arts and Academic Foundations at North Hennepin Community College in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. She is a poet, writer, and educator. A Cave Canem and VONA fellow, she received a McKnight Foundation Artist Fellowship in Creative Prose and a Mirrors and Windows Fellowship funded by the Loft Literary Center and the Jerome Foundation in Minnesota.
