TAIYON J. COLEMAN: Celebrates publication of “ Traveling Without Moving: Essays from a Black Woman Trying to Survive in America ,” made up of intimate essays from the author’s life including her childhood in Chicago — growing up in poverty with four siblings and a single mother — and the 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 and violent legacies of racism in this country.
She muses on why, more than 50 years after the Fair Housing Act passed, she and her Black African husband are the only Black family on their block and the forces behind the fact that she and her husband, college graduates, make less money than less-qualified white neighbors. Coleman is a poet, writer and educator, and associate professor of English and women’s studies at St. Catherine University .
Her work has been widely anthologized. Launch program at 6 p.m.
Tuesday, June 4, Moon Palace Books , 3032 Minnehaha Ave., Mpls., in conversation with Lester Batiste and April Gibson; Noon Sunday, June 2, First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, 900 Mount Curve Ave.
, Mpls., in a discussion about Black women’s mental health, sponsored by Minnesota Women’s Press . Register at womenspress.
com . APRIL GIBSON: Discusses “The Span of a Small Forever” in conversation with Erin Sharkey. 7 p.
m. Wednesday, May 29, Magers & Quinn,.
