Traveling without Moving: Essays from a Black Woman Trying to Survive in America

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A stunning lyrical commentary on the constructions of race, gender, and class in the fraught nexus of a Black womans personal experience and cultural history

The Fair Housing Act passed in 1968, and more than fifty years later, yours is seemingly 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. Youre the only Black student in your graduate program. You just arent working hard enough. Youre too sensitive. Sandra Bland George Floyd Don't take everything so personally. Amid the white smiles of Minnesota Nice and the Minnesota Paradoxthe insidious racism of an ostensibly inclusive place to livewhat do you do If youre Taiyon J. Coleman, you write.

In Traveling without Moving, Coleman shares intimate essays from her life: her childhood in Chicagogrowing up in poverty with four siblings and a single motherand 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 familyan act at once a responsibility and a privilegebringing 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, Colemans 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.

Author Bio

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 childrens 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 womens studies at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, Minnesota.