Natalie Rose Richardson
Natalie Rose Richardson was born in New York City to a long line of border-crossers and proud people of blended heritage. Natalie is a graduate of the University of Chicago (BA), and the Litowitz Creative Writing Program (in poetry) at Northwestern University. She is a current non-fiction MFA candidate at NYU. Her poetry and prose has appeared, or is forthcoming in: Poetry Magazine, Narrative, Orion Magazine, North American Review, The Adroit Journal, Brevity, The Cincinnati Review, Arts & Letters, Emergence Magazine, Chicago Magazine, and others, along with numerous anthologies, including The Golden Shovel Anthology. She has received awards, residencies or fellowships from the Poetry Society of America, The Poetry Foundation, Tin House, The Newberry Library, The Luminarts Foundation, Crab Orchard Review, Davis Projects for Peace, Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and the National Student Poets Program. Natalie's work has featured at BBC Radio London, Tedx, WBEZ Chicago, The British Royal Library, The Art Institute of Chicago and the Poetry Foundation. She is a 2020 Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets nominee.
The impact of poetry and the spoken word club
Spoken Word Club gave me unprecedented access to today’s world of poetry. This world was not the stuffy, old-dead-white-man-stuff of my school English curriculums. It was a world of living writers, Tweeting and Instagramming writers; Chicago writers, brown and black writers, women writers, twenty-something writers; writers who, because of Peter Kahn, would come to Spoken Word Club and read their work aloud— relevant, alive, urgent. It was not just that their stories and perspectives were more relatable to me than Whitman’s, though this was important. More crucially, their subjects and preoccupations gave permission for me to share my own. Here were decorated writers writing about the least-profound, yet most surprising of things: menstrual blood, taco grease, butcher boys, a sibling’s heroin spoon, the neighborhood junk shop, a mother’s worn shoes. I learned from them that the writer’s most profound subject is so often in the ordinary, the close to home.
Writing Prompts
Imagine “angels” following someone you love and give us interesting insights about that person
Start a poem with “Tomorrow, she will…” or “She will spend all day….”
Write a “portrait” of a family member’s struggles while trying to maintain an upbeat tone
And so in Spoken Word Club I wrote about the ordinary—or what was ordinary to me. I wrote about my home, and what I held close. And I found that magic stuff that comes from writing one’s own story: not just the catharsis of writing it down, but the revelation that comes from editing those original words over and over, tinkering with them like a puzzle, seeing how our truth changes shape and clarifies when we attach new words to it, and in different configurations. It is not, I discovered, the earliest draft that holds the most truth, but the final draft, the one that has gone through seemingly-endless iterations. This is where you really arrive at something.
Spoken Word Club is a place where high schoolers are schooled as writers. It is a place where— though the expressive value of writing stories down is highly valued— the craft of writing is held paramount. In other words, it is not enough to simply write your story down. How can you write it in the way that will best serve the truths you are trying to say? How can your language enhance, rather than detract or distract from, your meaning? How can you arrive at where you are trying to go? Nowhere else in my young life did I experience this level of craft education.
So in addition to giving me unprecedented access to today’s world of poetry, Spoken Word Club also gave me access to a different, more mysterious world: the interior world, the world of myself. I “arrived.” I discovered my preoccupations. (For example: In addition to my interest in American history, I have an unending writerly love for cockroaches and wigs.) I saw my own ideologies confront me on the page. I wrestled with old metaphors, which is a way of wrestling against the past.
Most importantly, I learned that in order to know anything—including myself— I first have to write it down, then spend a lifetime editing.
Top favorite poets or lyricists
Pascale Petit, Natasha Trethewey, and Natalie Diaz