Traveling without Moving

Essays from a Black Woman Trying to Survive in America

2024

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Author:

Taiyon J. Coleman

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

A Black woman in America is always on the run, desperate to survive, thrive, and finally find freedom. 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, Taiyon J. Coleman 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.

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.

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Nikky Finney, author of Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry

Tags

Literature, American Studies, Cultural Criticism, Minnesota and the Upper Midwest, Race and Ethnicity, Biography, African American

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.

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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 2018–19 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Katherine Kassouf Cummings, coeditor of What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be?

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