Taiyon J. Coleman’s book Traveling Without Moving: Essays by 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 tells intimate stories from her life, growing up in poverty in Chicago, experiencing institutional racism and implicit bias in writing classes, witnessing the violent consequences of racism in the U.S. housing market, maternal health inequalities across the country, and even the impact of those inequalities on her own miscarriage.
She explores what it means for her to write her story and the story of her family as an act of privilege and responsibility, and expresses the inherent contradictions between American ideals and black realities.
Coleman believes that a black woman in America is always on the run—that she is always Harriet Tubman, traveling with her babies in tow, searching for safety, desperately trying to survive, thrive, and finally find freedom.
The essays in Travel without moving do what the best nonfiction does. They take the special moments of a life and present them in a way that really resonates, especially with anyone who has had to work hard to succeed, anyone who has carried the scars of childhood and used them to strengthen their resolve on life’s sometimes treacherous paths.
Biography: Taiyon J. Coleman, MFA, PhD, is dean of humanities 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 has 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 of Minnesota.
