Jacqueline Woodson and Marilyn Nelson wrote extraordinary memoirs, which are also verse novels. If you haven’t read them, you should. Right now. Brown Girl Dreaming won the 2014 National Book Award and is Jacqueline Woodson’s autobiography told in free verse. Covering...
One of the things verse novels do best is bring the reader into the mind of the character. That ability renders difficult subjects like rape and abuse intimate and painful to read. In Blood, Water, Paint Joy McCullough writes about an Italian Renaissance painter,...
Margarita Engle is the 2017-2019 National Young People’s Poet Laureate. She’s a Cuban-American poet whose work is grounded in Cuban history. Her language is evocative and beautiful – I think that’s what makes these stories transformative. Part of why I...
It’s a trifecta for me. These authors do something amazing. They craft a verse novel around a historical subject — sometimes nonfiction sometimes in the genre of historical fiction — in POETRY. For me, poetry is challenging. Studying history is challenging.  But to...
