In Los Angeles, he ran a sign shop during the day and worked the graveyard shift as a janitor at RCA Victor Records.
[4] Shortly after finishing high school, she married white Southerner Charles Coleman, a troubleshooter for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s.
[4] After divorcing her first husband, Coleman worked a variety of jobs to make ends meet as a single mother, including waiting, typing, and editing a soft-core pornography magazine.
[8] In a 2020 New Yorker article, author Ben Chiasson refers to an interview Coleman did with the Poetry Society of America where she describes herself as a “Usually Het Interracially Married Los Angeles-based African American Womonist Matrilinear Working Class Poor Pink/White Collar College Drop-out Baby Boomer Earth Mother and Closet Smoker Unmolested-by-her-father.” [9] Within her writing, whether it be fiction, essays, or poetry, Coleman introduces and develops characters whose lives bring to light social inequalities.
[12] After her death, Black Sparrow Press, Coleman's longtime publisher, released Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems, Edited & Introduced by Terrance Hayes in 2020.
Author Mary Karr wrote, "Wicked Enchantment has words to crack you open and heal you where it counts—hateful and hilarious, heartbroken and hellbent."
Writing online for Poetry in a piece entitled "Heart First Into This Ruin",[13] Lizzy LeRud wrote: "Today, Coleman's significance is unquestioned....
In Wicked Enchantment, Coleman's fans, new and old, will find some of her most vital challenges to American racism and its market-driven culture, rendered in her uniquely unsettling lyric voice.
"In our post-9/11 America, where unwarranted suspicions and the fear of terrorism threaten to overwhelm long-coveted individual freedoms, a book review seems rather insignificant—until the twin specters of censorship and oppression are raised.
What has made our nation great, despite its tortuous history steeped in slavery, are those who have persisted in honoring those freedoms, starting with the Constitution and its amendments.