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

Taiyon J. Coleman's Traveling without Moving is a lyrical commentary on the constructions of race, gender, and class in the fraught nexus of a Black woman's personal experience and cultural history. She shares intimate essays from her life, exploring the empowering decision to leave her first marriage, the violent legacies of racism in the U.S. housing market, and the maternal health disparities seen across the country. 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.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 160 pages
Publication date: 08 July 2024
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press

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, "Traveling Without Moving" by Taiyon J. Coleman is a powerful and intimate exploration of the author's life. Coleman shares intimate essays from 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, and about the maternal health disparities seen across the country and their implication in her own miscarriage. 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. 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 a deep understanding of the complexities of race, gender, and class in American society.

Weight: 246g
Dimension: 140 x 210 x 16 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781517913298