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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.
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...