- This event has passed.
TRAVELING WITHOUT MOVING event at University of Minnesota Libraries with Taiyon J. Coleman
November 21 @ 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm CST
Taiyon J. Coleman will join the University of Minnesota Libraries for a reading and discussion of her new book Traveling without Moving: Essays from a Black Woman Trying to Survive in America, on Thursday, November 21.
This event will take place in the Givens Conference Room at the Elmer L. Andersen Library on the UMN Twin Cities campus. Doors open/book sales beginning at 6:30 p.m.; program from 7:00 to 8:00 followed by book signing and reception.
Please register if you plan to attend.
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.” —Nikky Finney, author of Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry
“[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
