A native of Gainesville, Florida, Natalie earned her M.F.A. in Creative Writing at the University of Florida and completed her Ph.D. in American Studies at Michigan State University as a University Distinguished Fellow. Her poems have appeared in Callaloo, New England Review, Valley Voices: A Literary Review and Southern Humanities Review; and her articles have appeared in The Journal of Popular Culture and Transition. She an award-winning author and performer who has toured nationally with her collection of poems, Begin with a Failed Body. In August 2021, Natalie was appointed inaugural Poet Laureate of Orange County. A widely published scholar and creative leader, she serves as Interim Associate Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Cal State University, Fullerton. In this role, she develops faculty-based initiatives that support artistic development and community-based research in Orange County. When she isn’t making poems or dreaming up programs, she loves perfecting her chocolate chip cookie baking skills and learning about science with her son, Ronald. Find her on IG @nataliejograham.
Poems that consider body a site of revelation, this collection of poems begins rooted in the landscape of the U.S. South as it voices singular lives carved out of immediate and historical trauma. While these poems dwell in the body, often meditating on its frailty and desire, they also question the weight that literary, historical, and religious icons are expected to bear and the shadows they cast. The vast scope of the poems arcs from a pig farmer's funeral to the paintings of Georges de la Tour and Toni Morrison's Beloved. With an ear tuned to the lift and lilt of speech, they wring song from sorrow and plant in every dirge a seed of jubilation. Rich in clarity and decisive in her attention to image, Natalie J. Graham writes resonant, lush poetry. Begin with a Failed Body was chosen by Kwame Dawes for the 2016 Cave Canem Poetry Prize.
Select Work
Leaping Fire in Princeville Park; Poetry Northwest, Feb 2018.
Underneath There is a Wound; LitHub, November 2017.
From “Cracks in the Concrete: Policing Lil Wayne’s Masculinity and the Feminizing Metaphor” Journal of Popular Culture
Reconsidering Lil Wayne as a parody in tandem with his moments of gender illegibility and journalists’ descriptions of him, emphasizes neutralization of radical potential through the act of reading rap music as authentic and “hypermasculine.”
This embrace of parody, performing his rap personas even to the point of caricature and contradiction (i.e., when feminizing metaphors simultaneously contradict and reaffirm hegemonic masculinity), reveals the potential subversive nature of Lil Wayne as a black cultural icon. Lil Wayne destabilizes black masculinity by highlighting ambivalence with pun. He assures his listeners that passive consumption of ‘normal’ bodies and authentic narratives will not be possible with his newest music, revealing the instability of text, body, and gender. As Kyra Gaunt writes, “Although the system of gender identification always appears coherent and fixed, especially in mainstream hip hop, it is in fact highly unstable and is only made stable though generalizations about gender roles” (176). Parody and pun uniquely destabilize these norms.
First page and link to purchase, here:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jpcu.12436/abstract
From “What Slaves We Are: narrative, trauma, and power in Kendrick Lamar’s roots” Transition Magazine
To Pimp a Butterfly was black on purpose, and journalists noticed. Critic Clover Hope’s description of the album’s blackness as “overwhelming” was cited liberally by other music and culture critics, including Slate writer, Carl Wilson, who wondered how white listeners should approach said blackness. Lamar chafed in a Hot 97 radio interview at people’s mistaking the soul of his first single off the CD for pop, saying “that’s sophisticated gangsta shit.” He not only called it “black. Not pop,” but underscored the necessity for listeners, especially youth, to recognize it as such. Lamar rejects the cultural appropriation ushered in by postracial imaginaries, including the appropriation of trauma, which ironically Roots forecasts. Throughout his work Lamar references black filmic, musical, and pop culture voices to create new, kaleidoscopic narratives of black urban possibility. He references Roots and slavery in “King Kunta,” “Vanity Slaves,” and “Vanity Slave Pt 2” to question and revise the enduring ideals that Kunta Kinte and slave caricatures represent.
More about the issue and link to subscribe/buy: http://hutchinscenter.fas.harvard.edu/transition-122
Write to me: ngraham@exchange.fullerton.edu