About the Book

Mixing a colloquial voice with textured imagery, Learning How to Fly is [Etienne Toussaint's] gripping debut poetry collection, a coming of age novel-in-verse that explores the complexity of belonging to a community that celebrates black humanity while searching for acceptance in a world that seemingly disdains black lives.

The stories of an ambitious corporate associate from Baltimore, a quixotic journalist from New York City, and a frustrated police officer from the Sea Islands of South Carolina collide in the nation’s capital where tragedy reminds us that many struggle to fly when pushed over the edge. With poetic narrative storytelling that is simultaneously personal and political, Learning How to Fly grapples with the question of how one can attain the heralded American Dream while carrying the heavy load of history and bearing the deep scars of racism and oppression.

Toussaint's work rises above the chaos in an age of social unrest, enabling the reader to discover amidst vulnerable moments of intense beauty and searing pain the unifying power of empathy.

About the Author

Etienne C. Toussaint '07 earned a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT. He also holds M.S.E. in Environmental Engineering from The Johns Hopkins University and a J.D. at Harvard Law School. He has served served as Visiting Associate Professor of Clinical Law and Friedman Fellow at The George Washington University Law School; project finance associate with Norton Rose Fulbright US LLP, Law & Policy Fellow with the Poverty & Race Research Action Council in Washington, D.C.; and strategy consultant for Booz Allen Hamilton. 

Toussaint is currently an assistant professor of law at the UDC David A. Clarke School of Law, where he teaches Contracts and co-directs the Community Development Law Clinic. His research interests include the intersection of racial justice and community economic development, environmental justice, technology and the law, and promoting social and economic justice through transactional law practice. He is admitted to practice in New York and the District of Columbia.

Toussaint, Etienne C. Learning How to Fly. LC Press, 2018.