Taiyon J. Coleman will join Moon Palace Books on Tuesday, June 4 at 6:00 p.m. for a presentation on her new book Traveling Without Moving: Essays from a Black Woman Trying to Survive in America. Tai will be joined in conversation by Lester Batiste and April Gibson.

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.

"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." —Kao Kalia Yang, author of Somewhere in the Unknown World: A Collective Refugee Memoir

"Her 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

"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

Lester Batiste is a savage writer in living color who writes for
political, social, economic change and Black futures. Born in Chicago, IL, he
holds an MFA from the University of Southern Maine's Stonecoast writing
program, and an M.S.Ed. from the University of Pennsylvania. Influenced by
Gwendolyn Brooks, Carl Sandburg, and Toni Morrison, Lester strives to weave
traditional forms and techniques with the vibrancy of African American
experience and speech. Rich details are enhanced by the musical tones from
Lester’s childhood on the Southside of Chicago to his present on the Northside
of Minneapolis. Lester's work has appeared in print in The Stone House
Anthology (2014), the Southern Griot Journal (2012), Tulane Review
(2017), A Garden of Black Joy (2020), and digitally in the Brushfire
Literary and Arts Journal (2020), Hidden Peak Press (2022), The Indianapolis
Review (2023), and The Bitchin’ Kitsch (2023). Lester’s debut poetry collection,
Angel and Night’s Youngest, is forthcoming in 2024 with the Black Spring
Press Group (UK).

April Gibson is a poet, writer, and professor from the South Side of Chicago. Her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Rhino Poetry, Prairie Schooner,
and elsewhere. She is a recipient of The Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award
among other honors. She teaches in the Department of English,
Literature, and Speech at Malcolm X College. Her debut poetry collection
The Span of a Small Forever was published by Amistad/HarperCollins in 2024.