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Secondary literacy instruction demands that educators present engaging material to students with a range of reading abilities and interests. As former secondary ELA teachers, we recall how stamping out iambic pentameter or extolling the virtues of Emily Dickinson only went so far for an audience yearning to hear words that rang true to their identities. As educators preparing students to work with middle grades students, we are constant readers and seek authentic and relevant texts to share with young adolescents. In the past decade, verse novels have gained momentum as an inviting medium for presenting personal narrative and intersections of identity in poetic form (Cadden, 2011; Curtis, 2019). Many contemporary verse novels also face difficult sociopolitical issues head-on: police violence, the carceral system, racism, immigration, cultural identity, and sexuality.
In this article, we discuss the affordances verse novels offer adolescent readers for identity exploration, based on our experiences using them in middle grades classrooms and teacher preparation courses. We highlight two memoir-based verse novels, Brown Girl Dreaming (Woodson, 2014) and They Call Me Güero (Bowles, 2018), that could help students see how poetry can center joy and make space for their lived experiences.
Secondary literacy instruction demands that educators present engaging material to students with a range of reading abilities and interests. As former secondary ELA teachers, we recall how stamping out iambic pentameter or extolling the virtues of Emily Dickinson only went so far for an audience yearning to hear words that rang true to their identities. As educators preparing students to work with middle grades students, we are constant readers and seek authentic and relevant texts to share with young adolescents. In the past decade, verse novels have gained momentum as an inviting medium for presenting personal narrative and intersections of identity in poetic form (Cadden, 2011; Curtis, 2019). Many contemporary verse novels also face difficult sociopolitical issues head-on: police violence, the carceral system, racism, immigration, cultural identity, and sexuality.
In this article, we discuss the affordances verse novels offer adolescent readers for identity exploration, based on our experiences using them in middle grades classrooms and teacher preparation courses. We highlight two memoir-based verse novels, Brown Girl Dreaming (Woodson, 2014) and They Call Me Güero (Bowles, 2018), that could help students see how poetry can center joy and make space for their lived experiences.
Why Verse Novels?
The verse novel form is adaptable for sharing students' lived experiences and voices. As readers bring their experiences to the text, and the white space, poetry has the power to transcend the boundaries of the page and invite the reader to build upon the story alongside the author (Cadden, 2011). Young and diverse readers are increasingly drawn to poetry, thanks in part to a social media-driven poetry renaissance (Ross, 2019). The growing appeal of poetry and the transactional nature of verse novels position them as unique texts in the transitional and identity-forming space of the middle grades.
In addition to their versatility, Letcher (2010) commented on the honesty and intensity of the verse novel form, as well as the "visceral nature of poetry" present in these texts (p. 87). Curtis (2019) wrote of the potential for verse novels to explore women's voices and described Brown Girl Dreaming (Woodson, 2014) as a literary space for examining Woodson's "search for identity and developing conception of herself as an author" (p. 56). In the context of these assertions about verse novels, we contend that part of their power is the possibility for sharing authentic and relevant experiences, particularly for examining the experiences of those whose stories are marginalized: incarcerated youth (e.g., Zoboi & Salaam, 2020); adolescent immigrants and refugees (e.g., Lai, 2013; Warga, 2019); and young adolescents living with trauma (e.g., Alexander, 2014; Reynolds, 2017; Woodson, 2020). Many recently published verse novels offer diverse and inclusive narratives that center race, linguistic diversity, and culture with an unflinching gaze.
Memoirs-in-Verse: Mentor Texts for Student Writing
Below we discuss how Brown Girl Dreaming (Woodson, 2014) and They Call Me Güero (Bowles, 2018) can act as mentor texts to explore identity and let students write themselves into a story. Verse novels provide a reframing of traditional ways to tell stories in narrative form, merging story and poetry. Moreover, verse novels can be taught as spaces where frequently marginalized voices and languages (e.g., AAVE, translanguaging) can be resonant when students use poems as mentor texts for writing.
Brown Girl Dreaming
A writer's ability to connect with readers can validate their identity and demonstrate to students how their life experiences are worth reading about. Brown Girl Dreaming (Woodson, 2014) is a strong mentor text for developing both readers and writers. Not only are students introduced to authentic experiences of the author, which validates life experiences as stories worth writing down, but they are also greeted with language that is accessible, colloquial, and real. Teachers could use the poem "the right way to speak" from Brown Girl Dreaming to explore the importance of language and identity with students, taking into consideration the ways that students' preferred languages (e.g., first languages, AAVE) may be marginalized or prohibited in school.
In Brown Girl Dreaming, Woodson collected memories of her youth (Penguin Middle School, 2014) and constructed the novel as an intimate space where she and young readers can experience those memories together. Woodson shares moments that challenged her and made her feel different. This series of poems by Jacqueline Woodson tells a family story, and it also examines systemic racism and oppression through the lens of childhood. When used as mentor texts, the poems in the book can be selected singly, or considered together as a complete narrative. They can also be paired with other poems thematically. For example, Woodson's poem football dreams can be paired with Langston Hughes's poem "A Dream Deferred" (2011) to spark a discussion about dreams students have or the dreams of their loved ones before asking students to write their own poem discussing dreams in some capacity.
Teachers can use Brown Girl Dreaming as a mentor text for composing with their students, opening up possibilities in poetry. Such work can include annotations of the poems, noting changes in voice, and examining the ways that the reader learns more about the author through the entries. Just as Woodson models, students can engage in drawing on personal experiences to create new poetic work.
An instructional process can begin with selecting poetic examples within a wider text set centering minoritized experiences. Teachers can share the selected poem on a screen or in groups, complete with initial annotations about what is salient on first reading. Through a close reading of each line and further discussion, students can engage in their own dialogic reflections and add annotations digitally. Woodson's use of personal elements and details, including childhood memories and words and phrases from family members, can inspire teachers to create additional mentor poems that lead students in the work of composing their own stories in verse, exploring memoir. We offer a poem here as an example of this work-a model mentor text written in response to a mentor text (grown folks' stories, Woodson, 2014, pp. 98-99) in which the use of particular images and memory were notable features:
These are the stories
of my childhood.
Falling on the nail,
the scar is still there.
Grandad thrown from the truck
on the way to the mines.
His back was never the same.
Wild frost roses by the train track,
the Christmas season celebrated
with the smell of soot in the air.
After this weaving of memory and emotion is shared, students can compose and share their own work in inviting spaces, like anonymous Padlet responses.
Leveraging Brown Girl Dreaming as a mentor text allowed students to re-story their lived experiences. Thus, the verse novel in this process served as both a transitional and transactional space for moving lived experience to the page and interacting with a mentor text. In sum, this teaching process can include a) reading the entire text alongside a range of other readings in a class text set; b) selecting segments of Brown Girl Dreaming; c) annotating initial points to guide students in adding their own annotations; d) making collaborative, digital annotations with students in dialogue; e) sharing mentor/memoir texts; f) inviting students to create and then share memoir texts anonymously.
We next note the affordances of a verse novel for exploring travel across languages and other boundaries.
They Call Me Güero
They Call Me Güero (2018) traces author David Bowles's life as a seventh-grade Mexican American "border kid." The verse novel transitions between English and Spanish, as well as gbetween poetic styles and forms. The smart circumscribing of the novel-a school year, roughly- provides a familiar narrative anchor for middle grade readers as they consider abstract concepts like identity, culture, and friendship.
Güero offers boundless opportunities as a mentor text. Middle grades teachers might consider modeling a think-aloud of a portion of its narrative arc, then asking students to collaboratively construct a timeline of significant events during the protagonist's seventh-grade year. Using Bowles's timelines as a template, students might reflect about their own life over a similar period of time (e.g., a school or calendar year). Creating a personal timeline as a prewriting task will allow students to develop poetic vignettes describing important moments with vivid imagery and detail, modeled after selected poems from Güero.
The poem "Trickster" offers an opportunity to integrate visual art and writing. Güero and his friends make masks inspired by traditions across cultures during a thematic unit designed by their teachers. He writes that ". . . masks / can either hide or reveal your identity / . . . should I pretend or reveal? What's inside me?" (Bowles, 2018, pp. 35-36). This poem might inspire students to design their own symbolic masks, as well as discuss the metaphorical masks we may wear as we choose how to present ourselves to the world. Paul Laurence Dunbar's (1896) "We Wear the Mask" might also help spark discussion about metaphorical masks. The poem is an exploration of the mask of self-preservation that Black Americans have been forced to wear in the gaze of their oppressors: "We wear the mask that grins and lies / It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,- / This debt we pay to human guile; / With torn and bleeding hearts we smile . . ." Teachers should be prepared to facilitate anti-bias, anti-racist discussions when engaging in an exploration of Dunbar's poem. Teachers may ask students to design a mask for themselves, accompanied by an artist's statement about the mask's hidden, symbolic, or metaphorical meanings; existing artist statements or museum exhibit descriptions of paintings, masks, or illustrations can serve as mentor texts.
Bowles also includes a two-voice poem in the form of text messages between Güero and his girlfriend Joanna (p. 71). The dialogic nature of this form, along with its economy of language courtesy of text messaging slang, may be particularly appealing to middle graders, who are "especially adept at processing social information" (Gopnik, 2018, n.p.). Amanda Rigell, a white teacher educator and former secondary educator of 13 years, had success introducing two-voice text message poems with her former eighth-grade students in a culturally and linguistically diverse middle school as a way for students to reflect on significant events in their relationships with peers and to engage in perspective-taking by writing from two points of view on an issue.
A final writing activity with Güero as a mentor text might use Bowles's "personality" poems. He focuses on cultural artifacts and possessions to describe the personalities and characteristics of his closest friends and family members, observing and explaining the people in his inner circle through their tastes and traits-the music they love, the cars they drive, their accents, and their religious beliefs. Students could use these poems as mentor texts to construct poetic biographies of themselves, their loved ones, or people they admire or want to emulate as a way to bring joy into their writing.
Conclusions and Recommendations
Verse novels have grown in popularity over the last decade, and teachers continue to discover the utility of these books in secondary classrooms. Abate (2018) noted that the positive trend in the genre's popularity may have more benefits than the literary community previously realized: "[V]erse novels can also be a rich, fertile, and productive venue for discussing issues of social justice. Both fiction and nonfiction works can help to foster empathy, generate compassion, and address trauma" (Abate, 2018, p. vi). We also note the potential for verse novels to disrupt the whiteness of traditional canon as well as the genre of poetry itself (DeHart, 2020) by shining light on the excellence of historically minoritized writers. All of the verse novels that have been nominated for-or won-Newbery Medals and National Book Awards since 2012 are authored by Black, Latinx, or first-generation American authors, or authors who immigrated to the United States.
Verse novels offer possibilities for engaging students in poetic work that may be limited by more traditional texts. Verse novels convey narratives and often challenge traditional conceptions of poetry as an inscrutable genre of rhyming couplets and archaic words. The examples provided in this article reflect authentic lived experiences that are relevant for students at the middle grades level.
References
Abate, M. A. (2018). Verse-atility: The novel in verse and the revival of poetry. The Lion and the Unicorn, 42(2), v-viii.
Cadden, M. (2011). The verse novel and the question of genre. The ALAN Review, 39(1), 21-27.
Curtis, E. N. (2019). "She's saying the thoughts I didn't know anyone else had": YA verse novels and the emergent artistic voice of young women. The ALAN Review, 47(1), 54-63.
DeHart, JD. (2020). What the canon means now. NCTEBlog. https:// ncte.org/blog/2020/11/canon-means-now/
Gopnik, A. (2018, January 18). What teenagers gain from fine-tuned social radar. Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/articles/ what-teens-gain-from-fine-tunedsocial-radar-1516295266
Letcher, M. (2010). Off the shelves: Poetry and verse novels for young adults. English Journal, 99(3), 87-90.
Penguin Middle School. (2014). Jacqueline Woodson Brown Girl Dreaming author video. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=-2YJPGea94E
Ross, J. (2019, January 14). For a diverse new generation, poetry is a growth industry. Minneapolis Star Tribune. https://www. startribune.com/for-a-diverse-new-generation-poetry-is-agrowth-industry/504180842/
Literature Cited
Alexander, K. (2014). The crossover. HMH Books.
Bowles, D. (2018). They call me Güero. Cinco Puntos Press.
Dunbar, P. L. (1896). The complete poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Dodd, Mead, and Company.
Hughes, L. (2011). Selected poems of Langston Hughes. Vintage.
Lai, T. (2013). Inside out and back again. HarperCollins.
Reynolds, J. (2017). Long way down. Simon and Schuster.
Warga, J. (2019). Other words for home. HarperCollins.
Woodson, J. (2014). Brown girl dreaming. Nancy Paulsen Books.
Woodson, J. (2020). Before the ever after. Nancy Paulsen Books.
Zoboi, I., & Salaam, Y. (2020). Punching the air. Balzer + Bray.
Copyright National Council of Teachers of English Sep 2022