Paradise Extended: Searching for My Great-Grandfather’s Grave in a Segregated Cemetery
This Week from the Emergence Magazine Podcast
Emergence Magazine is a quarterly online publication exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality. As we experience the desecration of our lands and waters, the extinguishing of species, and a loss of sacred connection to the Earth, we look to emerging stories. Each issue explores a theme through innovative digital media, as well as the written and spoken word. The Emergence Magazine podcast features exclusive interviews, narrated essays, stories, and more.
Natalie Rose Richardson is a poet and writer who was born in New York City to a long line of border-crossers and proud people of blended heritage. In this essay, Natalie searches for her great-grandfather’s grave in a historically segregated cemetery and confronts the American notion of paradise as an ideology which imposes walls of separation onto the multilayered landscape—allowing some in and keeping others out.
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Listen to the rest of this story on Emergence Magazine’s website or by subscribing to the podcast.
Natalie Rose Richardson was born in New York City to a long line of border-crossers and proud people of blended heritage. Her poetry and prose has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Magazine, Narrative, The Adroit Journal, Brevity, Orion Magazine, Arts & Letters, The London Reader, and Chicago Magazine. She has received awards, residencies, or fellowships from Poetry Society of America, The Poetry Foundation, The Newberry Library, The Luminarts Foundation, Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and the National Student Poets Program, among others. She is a 2020 Pushcart Prize and a Best New Poets nominee.
Jamiel Law is an artist and illustrator with a fine arts degree from Ringling College of Art and Design. His clients include The New York Times, The New Yorker, Slate, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Equal Justice Initiative, and The Guardian. Jamiel works as a designer with BUCK in Los Angeles and is represented by Writer’s House for his work illustrating children’s books.
