Composer and flutist Valerie Coleman has gained wide recognition for music that fuses classical styles with African American vernacular elements. She founded the wind quintet Imani Winds and has recorded frequently with that group.

Coleman was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1970, and grew up in the same West End neighborhood that had been home to boxing great Muhammad Ali. She grew up poor and took to the flute even before she had regular access to the instrument, playing with sticks in her yard and pretending they were flutes. At 11, she began formal musical education, not only on the flute but as a composer; working with a portable organ at home, she wrote three symphonies by the time she was 14. Coleman attended Boston University, earning a double degree in theory/composition and flute performance. She went on to the Mannes College of Music in New York, where her flute teachers included Julius Baker and Judith Mendenhall; she studied composition with Martin Amlin and Randall Woolf. Coleman founded Imani Winds in 1997, hoping to provide role models for young African American wind players. The group has been durably successful, earning a Grammy award nomination in 2005 for its album The Classical Underground.

As a solo flutist, Coleman served in the early 2000s as understudy to Eugenia Zukerman at Lincoln Center in New York. She has also appeared at Alice Tully Hall in New York, Kennedy Center in Washington, and the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, among other prestigious venues. Her compositions are mostly for wind quintet (she has served as Imani Winds' resident composer), other chamber ensembles, band, orchestra, and solo flute. Her works have been recorded on the Cedille, BMG France, Sony Classics, eOne (formerly Koch International Classics), and Naxos labels, and in 2019, her Shotgun Houses was included on the Chamber Music Northwest collection Clarinet Quintets for Our Time. In 2002, Coleman's wind quintet Umoja was listed among the Top 101 Great American Works by Chamber Music America. ~ James Manheim, Rovi