Traveling without Moving

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