Some of my poems deal with my own traumatic experiences. I get the question often – how do I write about my trauma? Before I answer that question, let’s talk about what it’s like BEFORE a traumatic memory becomes a poem. Phase One: I start to feel anxious. Like...
This was first published as a guest column in the Prescott Journal on June 28, 2018 under the title, “I Still Have a Black Lives Matter Sign.” You might wonder why I’m including this on a writer/poet blog. A more political blog. Here’s why. My moral core – my belief...
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...
