DR. BICKMORE'S YA WEDNESDAY

YA Verse Novels: Marching to Their Own Beat

9/2/2026

Meet our Contributor: Dr. Melanie Hundley

Dr. Melanie Hundley is a Professor in the Practice of English Education at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College; her research examines how AI, digital and multimodal composition informs the development of pre-service teachers’ writing pedagogy. Additionally, she explores the use of AI, digital and social media in young adult literature. She teaches writing methods courses that focus on AI, digital and multimodal composition and young adult literature courses that explore diversity, culture, and storytelling in young adult texts.

She teaches AI and literacy courses including AI and Storytelling. Her current research focus has three strands: AI in writing, AI in Teacher Education, and Verse Novels in Young Adult Literature She is currently the Coordinator of the Secondary Education English Education program in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College.

YA Verse Novels: Marching to Their Own Beat by Dr. Melanie Hundley

Some writing projects flow so effortlessly from the pen that they seem to arrive fully formed. Others arrive more slowly and take much more time to find their flow and rhythm. My chapter, The Young Adult Verse Novel: Marching to Its Own Beat, in The Oxford Handbook of Young Adult Literature was definitely the second kind. The idea for the chapter started with the simple question: How did the YA verse novel become such a powerful form for telling adolescent stories? The more I read, the more I realized I wasn't tracing the history of a genre; I was listening for its rhythm.

Poetry, for me, has always been about more than beautiful language. It creates movement. It asks us to slow down, speed up, linger over a line, hear the repetition of a sound, notice the silence created by white space. Poets play with language. They make it dance. They stretch it, compress it, rearrange it, and sometimes break it apart so readers can discover something new in the pieces. Form isn't decoration; it's part of the meaning. Sometimes they follow the beat. Sometimes they deliberately disrupt it.

That playfulness became one of the threads that pulled me through this chapter. As I looked back across the history of the YA verse novel, I found myself thinking less about chronology and more about movement and musicality, about rhythm and rebellion. Genres, like music, develop through variations on familiar themes. Writers listen to those who came before them, borrow techniques, improvise, challenge expectations, and create something entirely new. Sometimes they follow the beat. Sometimes they deliberately disrupt it. Poets have been doing this for a very long time. YA verse novelists have been doing it in their work for as long as there have been YA verse novels.

The Beat poets fascinated me for this reason. Their poetry rebelled against traditional structures, embraced vernacular language, experimented with rhythm, and insisted that ordinary lives and difficult social issues belonged in poetry. They played with repetition, juxtaposition, syntax, sound, and the rhythms of jazz. Their rebellion wasn't just about what they wrote; it was embedded in how they wrote. Their work reminds us that experimentation is never experimentation for its own sake. Form and function work together. The rhythms of the poems mirror the rhythms of lived experience. This is what I saw in young adult verse novels. That spirit of rebellion echoes throughout the YA verse novel.

This distinction was important to me. So much of how I was taught poetry in school suggested that poetry was sacred and elevated—something to be admired from a distance rather than something I was capable of creating as a young writer. Poetry belonged to accomplished poets. My job was to study it, appreciate it, figure out what it meant, and perhaps dream of writing it myself somewhere in the future.

YA Verse Novels Keeps Poetry Alive

But that wasn’t the poetry the Beat poets created, and it wasn’t the poetry I kept encountering in young adult verse novels. This poetry felt alive. It played with language and form. It broke rules. It used the language of everyday life and made that language worthy of poetry. More importantly, the breaking of rules often did something. Form and function worked together.

The rhythms of these poems can mirror the rhythms of lived experience. A poem can feel breathless or hesitant, controlled or chaotic. Language can tumble forward, trip over itself, circle back, or make us stop completely. White space can become a pause, a silence, or something a character cannot say. Repetition can create a beat or make a thought feel inescapable. A line can break in an unexpected place and change how we hear what comes next. A poet can break a rule because breaking the rule communicates something that following it cannot.

That idea of poetry feels especially important in literature written for young people. Rather than asking adolescent readers to stand at a respectful distance and admire poetry, the YA verse novel invites them inside it. It asks them to listen, notice, interpret, and sometimes fill the spaces the writer deliberately leaves open. And perhaps it also offers young readers and writers something I wish I had understood much earlier: poetry isn't something you have to wait for permission to make. You can play with it. You can push against it. You can make it sound like the world you actually inhabit.

The YA Verse Novel as a Hybrid

That idea of poetry feels especially important in literature written for young people. Rather than asking adolescent readers to stand at a respectful distance and admire poetry, the YA verse novel invites them inside it. It asks them to listen, notice, interpret, and sometimes fill the spaces the writer deliberately leaves open. And perhaps it also offers young readers and writers something I wish I had understood much earlier: poetry isn't something you have to wait for permission to make. You can play with it. You can push against it. You can make it sound like the world you actually inhabit.

Perhaps that shouldn't be surprising. The YA verse novel is itself a hybrid. It borrows from poetry and prose and sometimes drama and visual art. It tells a sustained narrative, but it does so through poems. It gives us characters and plots while asking us to pay attention to line, rhythm, image, sound, shape, and silence. It occupies an in-between space.

So does its primary audience. Adolescence is also an in-between space—not childhood, not quite adulthood, but a period of becoming. Adolescents experiment with language, identity, relationships, boundaries, and expectations. They question rules. They try on voices. They push against categories other people have created for them. There is something wonderfully appropriate, then, about telling adolescent stories through a literary form that also refuses to stay neatly inside its assigned boundaries.

As I worked on the chapter, I began to see that history as a series of waves, each building on the one before it while finding its own rhythm. Like musicians riffing on an earlier melody, authors borrow techniques, challenge conventions, and expand the possibilities of what the form can do. The result is a genre that continues to evolve while remaining unmistakably connected to its roots. In the first wave, writers such as Arnold Adoff and Mel Glenn helped establish the instrumentation: adolescent voices, vernacular language, experimentation with poetic forms, and stories centered on concerns relevant to young people. The second wave increased the complexity of both the poetry and the storytelling while pushing more deeply into difficult social issues. And the third wave has built on those possibilities, exploding whose stories are represented, experimenting even further with form, and exploring identities and social issues in increasingly complex cultural and historical contexts.

Each wave listens to what came before it and then changes the sound.

Ellen Hopkins's Crank

One of the central arguments I make in the chapter is that Ellen Hopkins's Crank trilogy represents a pivotal moment in the evolution of the genre. Hopkins didn't simply tell difficult stories in verse. She used line breaks, white space, visual design, repetition, and typography to deepen characterization and invite readers into the emotional experience of addiction. The poems don't just tell Kristina's story; they embody it. At times the words split apart on the page. At others they form shapes or create separate pathways through a poem. White space becomes part of what we read. The page itself becomes part of the narrative.

That realization changed the way I think about verse novels. It's easy to describe them as stories told in poems. The best verse novels couldn't simply be converted into prose without losing something essential. Their rhythms create pacing. Repetition creates patterns and connections. Line breaks create hesitation or momentum. Visual structures create tension. White space creates silence. And those silences ask readers to participate, to make connections and sometimes to fill in what isn't said. Their silences invite readers to participate in making meaning. Poetry gives narrative another dimension because we aren't only following what happens. We are experiencing how it happens.

That is where musicality becomes especially important. Music isn't simply a sequence of notes, just as a story isn't simply a sequence of events. Rhythm, tempo, repetition, variation, pause, and silence shape how we experience both. Verse novelists have all of those tools available to them. A poem can race across a page and then suddenly stop. A word can return like a refrain. The arrangement of language can suggest movement before we have fully processed what the words themselves mean.

Kwame Alexander's The Crossover

Later verse novelists build on and extend these possibilities. In The Crossover, for example, Kwame Alexander uses typography, rhythm, repetition, white space, and the language of basketball to make movement visible on the page. We don't simply read that Josh Bell is dribbling a basketball; the language moves. The poem has a beat. The words speed up, shift, stretch, and fall across the page. Poetry allows the narrative to perform the action it describes.

That is part of what I find so compelling about the form. Like musicians riffing on an earlier melody, YA verse novelists listen to what other writers have done and then create their own variations. The result is a genre that continues to evolve while remaining connected to its roots. Today's verse novels tell stories about family, grief, racism, immigration, identity, violence, body image, belonging, ordinary life, and extraordinary circumstances. They cross genres and forms. But again and again, writers return to the possibilities created when poetry and narrative meet.

Drafting The Chapter for The Oxford Handbook of Young Adult Literature

Of course, this particular chapter didn't find its rhythm overnight. It went through more revisions than I care to count, and I am deeply grateful to Vic and Crag, the editors of The Oxford Handbook of Young Adult Literature. They asked hard questions, encouraged me to keep pushing my thinking, and patiently guided the chapter through countless rewrites. Their thoughtful feedback challenged me to clarify my ideas and strengthened the final version. Scholarship is always a conversation, and I am thankful they were such generous conversation partners—even when that conversation sent me back for yet another revision.

Somewhere in all those revisions, I stopped trying simply to define the YA verse novel and started listening more carefully to what it was doing. I hope readers of the chapter do the same. I hope they come away with a deeper appreciation not only for the history of YA verse novels but also for what poetry contributes to storytelling. Poetry asks us to hear language differently. It invites us to notice rhythm, repetition, silence, visual space, and the possibilities created when writers deliberately break patterns and expectations. It reminds us that stories aren't simply told through plot. They are experienced through voice, sound, movement, form, and sometimes through the spaces between words.

Perhaps that's why the YA verse novel continues to resonate so powerfully with adolescent readers. Like adolescence itself, it resists easy definitions. It occupies spaces between established categories. It experiments. It plays. It questions. It pushes against expectations. It rebels.

And through all of that, it continues to march to its own beat.

Exploring Courage, Justice, and Global Awareness through Outstanding International Books

8/26/2026

Meet our Contributor:

Emily Pendergrass teaches literacy and children's literature courses at Vanderbilt University. Her research interests include improving reading practices with adolescents who struggle with school-based reading and how these practices intersect with teacher decision-making.

Exploring Courage, Justice, and Global Awareness through Outstanding International Books by Emily Pendergrass

Each January, the United States Board on Books for Young People (USBBY) releases its Outstanding International Books (OIB) list, highlighting exceptional children's and young adult titles published in the previous year. To be eligible, books must have been originally published outside the United States before being released or distributed in the U.S. The OIB list serves as a valuable guide for ELA teachers seeking high-quality international literature for adolescent readers. This year’s list includes 5 titles that are excellent choices to include in high school libraries or in instructional materials. To see the full list of Pre-K-12 texts click here.

Outstanding International YA Books

Bassett, Louise. The Hidden Girl. Walker Books Australia. (Australia/Indonesia)
Magicdusté, Akvilė. The Bees: The Women Who Rocked Lithuania. tr. from Lithuanian by Erika Lastovskytė. illus. by author. Fantagraphics. (Lithuania)
O’Brien, Gráinne. Solo. Little Island. (Ireland)
Sanna, Alessandro. Old as Stone, Hard as Rock: Of Humans and War. tr. from Italian by Ammiel Alcalay. illus. by author. Unruly/Enchanted Lion. (Italy) Volbeda,
Ludwig. Self Portrait. tr. from Dutch by Lucy Scott. illus. by author. Levine Querido. (The Netherlands)

Sharing One Novel in Depth: Exploring Courage, Justice, and Global Awareness Through The Hidden Girl

Young adult literature has the power to transport readers into unfamiliar worlds while asking them to wrestle with deeply human questions. The Hidden Girl does exactly that. Through Melati's determination to uncover the truth behind a stolen diary and Devi's harrowing experience with human trafficking, readers are invited to consider difficult questions about courage, justice, responsibility, and what it means to act when something feels wrong.

For high school students, this novel offers much more than an engaging mystery. It provides a meaningful opportunity to connect literary analysis with global awareness and civic engagement.

When Doing the Right Thing Isn't Easy

One of the most compelling aspects of the novel is that many of Mel's choices exist in a gray area. Readers are continually asked to consider whether her actions are brave, reckless, or some combination of both.

Students might begin by tracing key decisions Melati makes throughout the story:

Should she report what she discovers in the diary?
Was she right to keep information from adults and authorities?
When does persistence become recklessness?
What responsibilities do ordinary people have when they witness injustice?

Creating a decision map allows students to examine the options available to Melati, the potential consequences of each choice, and the factors that influence her decisions. Such conversations naturally lead to larger questions about ethics and personal responsibility.

Expanding Global Perspectives

For many American students, Indonesia may be a place they know little about before opening the book. Through Mel and Devi's stories, readers gain insights into Indonesian culture, geography, and contemporary social issues.

Students can reflect on questions such as:

What assumptions did I have about Indonesia before reading?
Where did those assumptions come from?
How did the novel challenge or complicate my understanding?

Research projects focused on Indonesian culture, geography, youth experiences, or contemporary social issues help students connect literature with broader global contexts while developing cultural awareness.

Literature as a Window into Human Trafficking

One of the most powerful dimensions of The Hidden Girl is its portrayal of human trafficking through Devi's perspective. Rather than learning about trafficking through statistics alone, students encounter its human impact through an individual story.

This creates opportunities for students to investigate:

What human trafficking is and how it operates.
Efforts to prevent trafficking.
Organizations that support survivors.
Actions communities can take to raise awareness.

These conversations should be handled thoughtfully and with appropriate support, but they offer an important example of how literature can deepen understanding of complex social issues (see Pendergrass, et. al., 2025 for a CAREful framework for having these conversations).

From Reading to Action

The most meaningful literacy experiences often extend beyond the final page. After reading The Hidden Girl, students can create awareness campaigns, podcasts, infographics, or public service announcements that connect the novel's themes to contemporary issues.

These projects encourage students to move from analysis to action by asking:

What can I do when I recognize injustice in the world around me?

In this way, The Hidden Girl becomes more than a novel. It becomes an invitation to think critically, engage empathetically, and consider how individual choices can make a difference in the lives of others.

For educators seeking texts that foster perspective-taking, ethical reasoning, and global awareness, The Hidden Girl offers a powerful starting point for meaningful classroom conversations.

Resource for difficult conversations:

Pendergrass, E., Hundley, M., Neel, M., & Pendergrass, K. (2025). The Sharp Edge of Silence: Using a Young Adult Novel to C.A.R.E. For Students. In K.C. Yurko & B. Adams (Eds.). Disrupting Silence: Rape Culture and Youth Texts. Peter Lang Publishers: New York.

“At the Table with British Literature, American Literature, Post-Colonial Literature:” A Conversation with Victor Malo-Juvera and Crag Hill on The Oxford Handbook of Young Adult Literature

8/19/2026

Meet our Contributor

Terri Suico is a professor of education and the associate dean of faculty development at Saint Mary’s College. She earned her EdD from Boston University School of Education and her MAT from Vanderbilt University. Her scholarly work has been included in several books and journals, including English Education and The ALAN Review. She currently serves as the book review and interview editor for Study and Scrutiny: Research on Young Adult Literature and is on the editorial team for The ALAN Review.

“At the Table with British Literature, American Literature, Post-Colonial Literature:” A Conversation with Victor Malo-Juvera and Crag Hill on The Oxford Handbook of Young Adult Literature

In spring 2026, young adult literature hit a new milestone with the publication of The Oxford Handbook of Young Adult Literature. Besides exemplifying the relevance of young adult literature and its scholarship, the handbook also represents the dedication and work of dozens of scholars, including the editors Victor (Vic) Malo-Juvera and Crag Hill. To know YAL research is to know Vic and Crag, who have published numerous articles and books and have mentored many scholars during their careers. In this interview, they reflect on their work on the handbook and the field of YAL.

Terri: Thank you both for talking to me about your work on The Oxford Handbook of Young Adult Literature. Congratulations on it being published! I have not been able to get my hands on it yet. I’m hoping to get our library to buy a copy of it.

Vic: You should! You absolutely should!

Crag: I haven’t got a paper copy of it yet. I have had dreams about receiving it in the mail, so clearly I desire the hard copy. Vic shared the copy that is in [his institution’s] library on social media. It is showing up in libraries around the world. Right now, the book is in Armenia, Australia, Bulgaria, Greece, the Netherlands, Span, the United Arab Emirates. It’s in 40 libraries right now.

Vic: I’m looking at it right now [on WorldCat]. It is in 38 libraries digitally, and there are two hardcovers. I guess that it is becoming more common to order the digital access for your library.

A book like this one is expensive, but esstential. A serious scholar will want to own a copy. In addition, anyone interested in studying YA Literature should encourage their school or University Library to purchase a copy.

This is the link to The Oxford Academy where your institution can obtain a copy.

Other important information about the book is below.

https://doi.org/10.1093/9780191945540.001.0001

Online ISBN:
9780191945540

Print ISBN:
9780192855435

Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Crag: It’s gotten great metrics. People can find out if it’s been cited. Let’s look at Chris Crowe’s “A History of Young Adult Literature.” It’s not been cited yet, but it’s had some pdf downloads. The references link to your Google Scholar. It’s Study and Scrutiny [the open-access journal Crag co-edits] on steroids. It’s a wonderful thing to see in itself.

Terri: You’ve been partners in your research for young adult literature. How did you start working together? What was your first project?

Crag: It’s an ALAN story. I had done two books at the time [The Critical Merits of Young Adult Literature and Teaching Comics through Multiple Lenses], and I was seeing my work as a trilogy. The next book was going to be on the high school canon. I think it took Vic maybe 20 seconds to say he’d want to be part of that.

Vic: I was originally going to write a chapter, and then we just started talking. I teach a class called Classics Reconsidered, which focuses on canonical high school books. When I heard about Crag’s idea, my eyes lit up, since that is right in my wheelhouse.

Crag: Then we expanded from what I saw as a trilogy into a quadrology [Critical Explorations of Canonical Young Adult Literature: Identifying and Critiquing the Canon] to be ballsy enough to say that there is a YA canon. The Oxford Handbook was a natural extension out of that. We’ve probably been working together eight or nine years. We’ve worked together long enough where our first meetings were on Skype. And we would often talk by phone. For The Oxford, which we’ve been working on for six years, we probably met on Zoom an average of twice a week during that time. Some weeks, we’d meet three times. I’m debating whether to say that at the college event because I don’t want to scare anyone. It was an immense amount of work. However, we didn’t plan to complete it overnight. We knew it was going to be a long process from talking with Vic’s colleague. We knew it’s a multi-year process. It [became about celebrating] the small joys along the way. When Wendy Glenn turned in the first chapter, it was like the book was out. It was small joys, and it all added up to six years of hundreds and hundreds of hours of Zoom meetings.

Vic: We had an Excel file where we would track all the chapters, and it was color coded. When something was done, it was like Ghostbusters, it turns green. Our joy was when we got to turn things green.

Victor Malo-Juvera

Crag Hill

The Origin Story

Terri: Could you tell me more about the origin story of The Oxford Handbook? How did you decide to embark on this? I know that you had been working on projects together and that you said this seemed like a natural next step. But how did start this very ambitious project?

Vic: I was training for IRONMAN Florida, and I was out on a 100-mile bike ride. My colleague, Keith Newland, had just come out with his second Oxford Handbook a few weeks before. When I’m out for six hours riding, my mind churns through all sorts of research ideas, and it just popped into my head. I was literally thinking, “Nobody’s ever done an Oxford Handbook of young adult literature.” I asked Keith what he thought about doing it, and he said, “That’s a great idea. I’ll put you in touch with my editors.” I called Crag and said, “What do you think of this idea? You want to do it?” He said, “Yup,” and that was it.

We contacted Keith’s editor, who put us in touch with another editor, who gave us their requirements. Then it was off to the races, starting to work on the proposal and going through their process.

Crag: The first work we did on it was in Baltimore [at the 2019 NCTE Convention]. We spread out in a couple of restaurants. Our first task was to brainstorm authors and topics. We pulled people in from our network, but we also thought about people outside our network that we knew were doing good work in the children’s literature field, which in many ways conflates with young adult literature.

Vic: We were working on that list, and we weren’t allowed to reach out to people. Oxford basically says, “We want you to give us a first and second choice for your chapter authors.” We’re not allowed to ask them beforehand because Oxford has a rigorous acceptance process where their editorial board reviews not only your whole proposal but all of your author choices.
For the first proposal, we submitted names. We also wrote two or three sentences on what each chapter would be about.

Crag: We had mini abstracts, and the majority of those chapters stayed. There were some revisionings of some of those topics. The four categories we initially identified were also revisioned, so there was some movement in that. But the fact that the initial vision pretty much was intact through the whole process says something about the process. That’s probably in part because of the rigor that Oxford put in place. We had to consider our ideas very seriously.

Vic: I’d say the only major change was that we had originally envisioned having some chapters on teaching YA literature. Because it is Oxford literature, they did not want anything directly like that, so that’s why there is no teaching. This is not to say that researchers don’t do pedagogical work, but that was something Oxford didn’t want in it.

Crag: The way I remember it, it wasn’t that we had separate chapters, but we were going to have the authors write about scholarship and then close with pedagogical suggestions. That’s my memory of it. Was it going to be two-thirds literary criticism and then a third on teaching?

Vic: We originally had a section called Issues in Teaching. We swung the whole idea by the first editor before we put in the proposal and said, “This is what we’re thinking. What do you think?” That’s when we got the feedback that there would be no section on teaching. They want it focused on literature. But let me double check our notes file, it is taking a while to load.

Terri: That is an ominous sign in and of itself.

The Proposal Process

Vic: It is 175 pages. When we were reading chapters, we would each make notes separately so we didn’t influence each other’s reading by sharing it ahead of time. When we would meet to discuss the chapter, what we liked, what we thought should be changed, and what could be improved, we would put our notes in the file together. Afterwards we would meet with authors. The pandemic was in full swing, and we found it easier to work with authors through Zoom meetings than just sending an email with the information. We would meet with the authors to go over feedback, and it allowed us to brainstorm out ideas and challenges. Sometimes we’d say, “That doesn’t really work, but we don’t know how to fix it,” and those conversations allowed us to figure out a way past the problem. Then we would send a follow-up letter with our formal feedback based on the conversation. We would put every email into the file so, when we were looking at a chapter, we could just go through the file and see exactly what we talked about.

Terri: What is great about this is that you have this wonderful archive not just of the work that you had been doing and what needed to be done but also of the process so that, if you were to ever embark on this again or if you were to advise anyone doing this sort of work, you could point them to this model. It sounds like Oxford was very interested in this topic. Did you have to do any sort of hard sell?

Crag: No. We just had to produce 39 great chapters for the proposal.

Vic: We did have to put in a whole proposal, and then we got feedback. Most of the feedback was positive. There was also some feedback they were just wrong about, and we clearly, loudly pushed back on it and told them they were wrong. It was fine. Like any reviewers, they ask for changes, and sometimes they are just wrong. Those emails are in the file.

For our second draft of the proposal, we did a few minor changes, and then we had to have a response to the reviewers’ comments, which went to their team. When that was approved, it went to the whole editorial board of Oxford. The biggest challenge was how long it took because it was the middle of the pandemic.

Crag: Even without the pandemic, they have a long train of handbooks going through. When we sent the first proposal, I don’t think we heard from them for months. It might have been as long as six months to get a response. With the second proposal, it wasn’t as long of a wait, but it was still probably three months.

Recuriting and Working with Chapter Authors

Crag: Vic, do you have a record of when we were able to contact the authors? We were in this process for over a year before we could email authors.

Vic: Let me check my files.

Crag: While he’s looking for that, [I want to say that contacting the authors] was a wonderful process, too. Our authors were grateful for being considered and were really excited. You do a lot of projects, and you get people to commit, but the way that they committed – or the tone they used when committing to this project – was gratifying. Those were fun emails to send, inviting people to a part of the Oxford Handbook project.

Vic: To give you an idea of the timeline, the idea first happens in September 2019. The first emails to potential chapter authors were sent on February 24, 2021.

Crag: The first chapter we got was from Wendy Glenn in December of 2021. Two-plus years into the process, we have our first chapter in the box, with – at that time – 40 more to go. We ended up with 39 chapters, and I think we originally had 42. Some we weren’t able to do because of illness and other things that came up.

Vic: Things happened. We had potential authors die, get ill, leave the profession, have to leave to take care of elderly relatives. We had one chapter that I still refer to as Spinal Tap’s drummer. We had originally envisioned having a chapter on library science and YA. The first person who was going to do it was Teri Lesene, but she passed away from cancer. We tried to get other people to do it, and something happened to them all until we finally decided, “We’re going with no drummer.”

Terri: It is incredible that you had this idea gestating for a year and a half before you could talk about it or make authors a formal offer. Did you speak to some authors in a more informal way?

Crag: I don’t recall that we gave anybody a hint.

Vic: No, we didn’t give anybody a hint at all.

Crag: We were keeping the secret close.

Vic: This is because they had to approve our authors before the authors knew. We didn’t want to talk to somebody and then have Oxford say, “We don’t want that person. They’re not established enough.” Now the handbook doesn’t really have a mix of newer professors because it’s been six years, but when we started, we had a very nice mix of new scholars, who were probably assistant professors at the time, mid-career scholars, and very well-known established scholars. We had a really good mix, and I think that’s good. The newer scholars often have fresh perspectives.

Crag: It was important to try and have that range.

At the same time that we were working on the Oxford, Routledge was doing a handbook of young adult literature. I reviewed the proposal, and I twisted and turned whether I should have because I was going to do the Oxford. In the end, after talking to people, I felt that there is room for 80 chapters on young adult literature on that level. However, I haven’t seen the Routledge Handbook. It would have had the same timeline, but perhaps that project did not get completed. It is pretty amazing, Vic, that you and I stayed healthy during COVID and that we still talk to each other after getting through the handbook.

Working Together

Terri: The fact that you’ve worked together for six years on this single project and are still friends and still talk to each other is a testament to your collegiality, your friendship, and your interest in the field.

Crag: My advice to anybody who wants to take on a project like this is to do another project with someone before you even propose it so you can go through the process [on a smaller scale] and to consider the collegiality as best you can.

Vic: Just like what Crag said, we had worked on two books before starting the Oxford. Also, Crag and I had an agreement that applies to everything we work on, and that is we both have to agree something is good. If he doesn’t like something and I do, it has to get fixed. I might try to convince him, but in the end, we have to respect each other’s ability to say “no.” Having that clear in an editorial relationship makes the process easier. Let’s say the three of us were editing something that there weren’t any rules. If you don’t like something, and the rest of us like it, you might think, “How can I change their minds? I’m going to be bitter walking away, but it isn’t ready.” Whereas, if we have a rule where we say, “Anyone can say no, and either we’ll try and fix it or it doesn’t go through,” it avoids possible conflict in editorial work.

Crag: We did have one particular chapter that I fought for – I didn’t think we could have an Oxford handbook without this topic. We had this one chapter that went through six, seven, eight drafts, and we are really, really proud of it now.

While we are on the topic, I want to credit all of the authors who worked very hard. There were multiple drafts. On average across the 39 chapters, there might have been an average of four drafts per chapter. I really want to recognize the authors for their patience and their resilience.
We are very different editors. Vic gets in the weeds like no one else I know and can really see how to improve a piece of work. The chapter that went through all of those drafts got there because of Vic’s microvision. I’m the macrovision reader. I teach graduate students, so I think of them as readers. Vic, if he wasn’t a teacher, he’d be an incredible editor. When we’d come to a meeting, we would both know what wasn’t working. He’d propose a solution that would help us get through. And I’ll say on the record that he was willing to keep me pushing a couple of chapters.

Organizing a Format for the Book

Terri: How did you go about identifying the chapter topics and then finding the contributors for the chapters? You mentioned Wendy Glenn and Chris Crowe, who you know through ALAN, NCTE, and Study and Scrutiny, but I would also imagine that you had to go further afield and find authors from outside of your network.

Vic: We started with the chapter ideas, and we brainstormed a list of chapters we wanted. Then we had some categories that they would go in.

Crag: We had four categories. Text and Genres was the first one.

Vic: Forms and Focus.

Crag: That was the second one, then Multicultural, Indigenous, and Global Impacts. And the last one is Beyond Texts.

More about Working with and Recuriting Authors

Crag: With our first proposal, the majority of contributors we identified were people we had already worked with. It was important to us that we knew they could turn in a chapter when we gave them a deadline. However, we did have scholars we did not know. We looked at Google Scholar and other sources to see any people writing about subjects we wanted to include. Probably a quarter of the people we chose were ones who had published in the field but were not ones we had known previously.

Vic: We would read their work. We wanted an international section, and we didn’t know Nadia El Kholy, who is a scholar of Egyptian children’s literature. Children’s literature in Egypt means young adult as well, so that’s how we found her. We wanted anybody writing about the literature in a particular place to be from there. Sometimes somebody would suggest scholars to us. Chris Crowe suggested Caryn Kunz Lesuma, who wrote an amazing chapter on Pacific Islander young adult literature. We have a scholar from South Africa, two from Australia, one from Egypt, two from the Netherlands. We had to do legwork on getting those authors, but we came up with the topics beforehand. We came up with the list, and then we would brainstorm authors. I’d say Crag was right. About 75% of the authors we knew already, and for that last quarter, we had to dig a little more.

Crag: That was fun, and it expanded our knowledge of young adult literature scholarship. The project we’re working on now, a content analysis of scholarship on international young adult literature, is another way of expanding our knowledge of the field and who the scholars are. Dare I say, if I weren’t at this point in my career, I’d love to do an Oxford handbook on international young adult literature.

Terri: In an earlier conversation, you said that what you learned about international young adult literature led you do guest editing an issue on the topic for The ALAN Review. What surprised you about either the young adult literature that is one the international scene or the scholarship that is happening with young adult literature on the international scene?

Crag: An adult in Norway who approaches a story about a teenager is different than an American author approaching a story about a teen because in Norway, they have a different literary history and a different children’s literature history. They have the folktales. One book, Nothing [by Janne Teller], intrigued me because it couldn’t have been written by an American. The author now lives in Los Angeles, but it is somebody who has Hans Christian Anderson and the Grimm brothers in their DNA as writers.

We don’t live in a monocultural world, and the authors in different cultures approach stories in different ways than we do in the United States, and that’s just intriguing. There are some Chinese scholars who are doing great work around Chinese YAL, which I didn’t even know there was such a thing. I feel like I’m traveling to these countries without having to deal with a 10-hour flight. It just opened up the world.

Vic: For me, what was really most eye-opening was how differently adolescence is constructed in different cultures, and of course, that impacts how the authors write about it. Along the way, we learned that most European kids, according to the people who talked to, like to read English YAL. They often read it as part of learning English, but they prefer to read in English than in German or Dutch. In talking to Nadia about Egypt, we learned that they really don’t have the same concept of adolescence. Once people reach a certain age, they’re considered adults, and most of their reading is religious or internet-based. They’re not getting the same adolescence period that we have here. That really struck and stuck with me because that’s going to change the books and the experiences you have. If you’re living in a country – not knocking any specific country – that is a religious theocracy, you’re not going to have a book like The Fault in Our Stars that challenges a religious paradigm or even have an age group where you question things. I found that really, really interesting. When I look to international young adult literature, I like to see what’s revealed in what’s written and what isn’t written.

Challenges and Surprizes

Terri: What has been the most challenge or surprising part of editing and putting together the handbook, and what has been the most rewarding part of the work?

Crag: The most rewarding part was getting the chapters I talked about earlier over the finish line and being really, really proud of them. I think the chapter author feels that way, too. It took eight drafts, and to be really proud of that chapter was a wonderful experience.

Vic: I’d say the same thing. Some chapters came in where there was very little to say [in terms of feedback], and we didn’t say anything. We didn’t try to justify our existence and ask for changes. There were a couple that were literally minor edits, like maybe the author didn’t have enough coffee and slipped on the keyboard for that one sentence. Then there were others at the other end of the spectrum that required more work. I’m not saying they were bad at all, but for whatever reason, they required more work to land where they needed to.

Crag: One challenge was maintaining the reading load. We planned [the schedule] out, but it got log jammed very quickly. Sometimes we might have three or four chapters that needed feedback. We have full-time jobs, too, so the paper load and the reading load were probably the biggest challenges.

Vic: I created some logjams, too, because I do the study abroad program in the summer and then I travel. I cannot work at the level I need to edit something on a laptop in a hotel in Berlin. When I travel, I don’t work unless it’s something that’s timely and has to be done. That created some logjams, because I would be gone.

Terri: Was there anything else you found challenging or surprising as you worked on the handbook?

Vic: Our manuscript was late. With any big project, you have a certain number of pieces that come in early, a bunch in the middle that come in on time, and then some that need more work. These were important chapters, and they are great chapters. The last 18 months, maybe even the last two years, were just getting the last 10 chapters finished and ready. That doesn’t reflect on the quality of the chapters. Some people had personal situations, and some people changed jobs.

Terri: And it was such a tumultuous time when you were writing it. If you think about what has happened since 2019, the fact that it only took six years is amazing.

Crag: I’d say the breadth of this project was a comfort during COVID. I felt that we were doing something valuable and worthwhile. The Oxford Handbook has a longer shelf life than our Routledge handbooks.

What does the Handbook Mean for the Status of the Field

Terri: You have already alluded to this, but what does having an Oxford handbook focused on young adult literature mean in terms of the field’s status? It wasn’t that long ago that an editor of YAL books told Michael Cart on a panel, “I think young adult literature is dying.” Fast forward 30 years, and we have this handbook.

Crag: My sweetheart worked at Barnes & Nobel until she resigned a couple of weeks ago. The YAL books they’re purchasing are down considerably, so publishing is suffering. However, YAL scholarship is not. We have people whose primary research agenda is in children’s and young adult literature. Having an Oxford Handbook is part of their argument for why they are researching this area. If you’re pretenure and people ask, “Why are you doing this?”, you can point to the Oxford Handbook. This book is the argument that says YAL has the same scholarly status as children’s literature has had for 50 years.

Vic: To build on that, it also separates YAL from children’s literature. After having it checked out for six years, I just returned The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature, which had YAL in it. I think it was published in 2011 or 2012. Separating young adult literature from children’s literature as a field was a major part of our argument. We’re not only at the table with children’s lit, but we’re at the table with British literature, American literature, post-colonial literature. That is what having an Oxford Handbook does for the field. Just as Crag said, there’s nothing more legitimizing to a field of special studies than to have an Oxford Handbook on it.

Terri: How do you hope the handbook is used.

Vic: Ubiquitously.

Crag: I want new scholars taking off from one of chapters and established scholars citing and expanding on somebody else’s chapter. That’s why I like the metrics. We can see the citations in real time for some of these. We’re doing work that’s generative and expanding. We’ve created something, and there’s going to be another ring 10 years from now. The universe of young adult literature is expanding.

Vic: I hope that it’s also used in teaching. There are lots of chapters that you can build instruction from at the university level. Our chapter on censorship looks at censorship and how modern censorship is part of a wave of fascism, and it ties it into theory. That is a fresh chapter. So many people have written about censorship, and this is a new angle on the topic.

Crag: I have used it in my YA class, and for this fall in a master’s class, I’ve used it to select books. Next year, I’ll be teaching in the Honors College as a presidential teaching fellow, and the class I’m doing needs to be interdisciplinary. I have been reading on how adolescence is perceived around the world, and I’m going to have students read chapters from the Oxford Handbook. I haven’t decided which ones yet.

Terri: Where do you hope that YA scholarship goes next, and what role might the Oxford play in that?

Vic: It’s interesting because young adult literature and its scholarship haven’t moved backwards, but in many ways, culture has. There is research that I’ve done that would be hard to do now when there are state universities that say students can’t do research on specific gender or queer studies. You have states like Florida where it’s a race to the censorship bottom. I look at the strides I thought we made through the 2000s and the 2010s, and now I’m aghast.

Crag: I think there’s a critical mass of early career and mid-career scholars of young adult literature that can help hold our heads above water so that we don’t drown in this, because this is going to pass. We have Stephanie Toliver, who’s got a long career ahead of her if she chooses. There’s Wendy Glenn, who’s producing quite a bit. There’s Troy Potter in Australia. I could name a lot of our authors who have 20-year careers, and they’re going to hold up not only the scholarship but the authors as well. Publishing will swing around, too. It’s cyclical. Publishers go where the money is, and right now the money isn’t going to middle grade literature. However, publishers should keep age bands like middle grade alive. They should be publishing great stories, even if some great stories only break even financially.
I do think we should be mailing the Oxford Handbook to the big five [publishers] and tell that that, “This is important. Don’t ignore it.”

Vic: Also, like anything that proves profitable, that YA is like many other genres where not everything is good. I think that is important for us to acknowledge that not all YA is good. Just like not all romance literature is good and not all horror literature is good. It’s okay to call that out.

I would assume from a critical angle that our next phase should follow the way other fields grow. Up until now, a lot of scholarly work is what we call activist work that says, “We should have more of this. We should have more of that.” Well, we have it, and there is a lot of YA out there. Now we will get into the critical angle even more. But again, look at what’s going on. We still need the arguments on why we should be talking about topics like racism, rape, and homophobia that is being silenced. However, there has been a big change in YA from 20 years ago. There is tons of YA out there, and it’s okay for not all of it to be good and for it to be called out.

Terri: Is there anything we haven’t talked about related to the Oxford that you wanted to touch on?

Vic: I think we’ve said it all. I think if it hadn’t been for Covid, Crag, we would have cut two years off of the process. The proposal process would have been faster. If it weren’t done during COVID, it would have taken three to four years.

Crag: We didn’t make one deadline. We were probably six months behind.

Vic: We were later than that, and we missed several deadlines because we were waiting to bring chapters home. Oxford was fantastic about understanding that we weren’t done. They were always magnanimous with us.

Podcasts and Young Adult Literature

8/12/2026

Meet Our Contributor; Rebekah Buchanan

Rebekah Buchanan (she/her) is a Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University and a former Roving Scholar Fulbrighter to Norway (2018-2019). Her research focuses on literacy practices and activism in youth culture, specifically through zines and music and rural teacher education. She has written extensively on popular culture in the classroom, youth’s out of school literacy practices, music-based pedagogy, and punk. She is currently the Vice Chair of NCTE’s The Rural Assembly on English Literacy and Language Education (TRAELLE). She is a host on New Books Network and contributes regularly to School Library Journal and Library Journal.

Podcasts and Young Adult Literature by Rebekah Buchanan

Podcasts are a great way to learn about new books and authors—both for yourself and your students. After a slight dip in 2022, the number of podcast listeners—and viewers—has steadily been on the rise. 58% of American’s have listened to at least one podcast a month so far in 2026—an all-time high. With the weekly podcast consumers at 130 million people, podcasts are becoming one of the fastest growing ways Americans consume their information and learn about the world. Even more interesting is that research shows that 64% of 12–34-year-olds are monthly podcast consumers. (Edison Research, 2026). Introducing students to podcasts about books allows them to hear from authors and explore genres and texts they might not have thought about reading before. It’s a platform they may already be using making it even easier for buy-in.

There are many different podcasts that focus on talking with young adult authors and combining podcasts with audiobooks, whole class novels, choice reading, and even writing assignments like podcast reviews are great ways to bring podcasts about young adult books into the classroom. Penguin Teen has a well-established podcast, We Are YA. Book Riot’s podcast Hey YA brings news about things happening in the YA world. 88 Cups of Tea talks with writers about craft and has a series focused on young adult authors.

I wanted to also introduce you to a new podcast channel I host on New Books Network. “The New Books Network is a consortium of author-interview podcast channels dedicated to public education. Covering 100+ subjects, disciplines, and genres, we publish 70 to 100 episodes every week. The NBN reaches about half a million people every month; NBN listeners download close to 1 million episodes a month.”

Recently, New Books Network launched a channel for Young Adult Literature. On the channel I talk with authors about their books, writing process, and inspirations. The channel just started in April, but I’ve had the chance to talk with some great debut authors as well as more established young adult writers. Since many of us are getting ready to return to the classroom and share summer reads and books we hope will inspire readers, I want to highlight some of my favorite debuts that might interest you and your students and some favorite interviews you might enjoy.

A Few Debuts

Brianna Jett’s Under a Carnivore Sky is a beautiful novel in verse. Sixteen-year-old Lili is a hunter in search of the monster who lives in the carnivorous swamp bordering her town. As long as the monster lives, it steals pieces of flesh from the adults of her town and until it can be stopped the town remains cursed by the monster. Lili meets Caleb who is desperate to escape the town and who will map the swamp for her as long as she helps him find a way out. Jett tackles themes of forgiveness, fear, and the price of hiding secrets. I especially enjoyed talking with Brianna about how much I loved the monster.

Inspired by a Moroccan folktale, Loretta Chefchaouni’s The Lustrous Dark introduces readers to Shay, they young protagonist training to be a midwife’s apprentice. In search of learning more about her past, Shay discovers her mother did not die but is instead addicted to the magical drug Snow. Betrayed by her birth mother, Shay must rely on a band of misfit ghouls to lead her to safety as she learns more about those in power in her world who control the magic and the revolution who want to eliminate it. As she finds her way through the forest with her new friends, she discovers herself and her newfound beliefs about her world and those in power. Chefchaouni uses this engaging fantasy novel to address addiction, family dynamics, political injustices and oppression, and feminism. We chatted about using fantasy to address these topics as well as the Moroccan inspirations in the novel.

L.L. Madrid’s My Lips, Her Voice is a dual voice novel where small town ghost stories and rumors of serial killers haunt a community. Cousins Audrey and Mara are not close Audrey wants to stay in the small town of Copper City while Mara can’t wait to leave. But, when Mara’s body is discovered in the town’s old mine and Mara’s spirit returns with the ability to hijack Audrey’s body at will, the two must learn to “live” together in Audrey to find out the town’s secrets. Audrey and Mara must work together to find the latest missing girl before it’s too late. Madrid brings readers into the world of the twins, Mara struggling to reclaim some of the life she once had and Audrey fighting for her own bodily autonomy. The novel combines horror and mystery with themes of generational trauma, LGBTQ love, town secrets, and supernatural abilities. Leigh and I talked about rural communities and writing horror.

Some Favorites from Established Authors

There are so many fabulous authors out there. I loved talking with Jason Reynolds about Soundtrack. We might have gone down a bit of a music rabbit hole if you want to hear us geek out about it.

I’m a sucker for a good mystery. Plus, my love for Lois Duncan novels draws me to anything involving high school and murder. Lish McBride’s Most Likely to Murder has the best high school yearbook superlatives ever.

Two books that I loved that brought art and art history to the classroom are Sayantani DasGupta’s latest middle grades Theft of the Ruby Lotus that is a love letter to New York, museums, and immigrant families and Elana K. Arnold’s haunting Holloway with an autistic protagonist who travels to France during World War II and learns of art, love, and acceptance.

Jilanne Hoffman and I talked about her middle grades Heartland and writing about the rural Midwest, environmental justice, family farming, and alternating timelines. We have a shared appreciation for how the farm crisis of the 1980s has made a lasting impact on current farming and our love for the Chicago Cubs.

Author and illustrator LeUyen Pham talked with me about the process of illustrating graphic novels with writing by Jennifer Lee and Gene Yang. Students interested in illustrating and graphic novel and picture books are structured will love this conversation.

There are many podcasts out there. The Young Adult channel on New Books Network is just one. Find one you enjoy, subscribe to it, and find more books to add to that ever-growing TBR shelf.

Citations

Edison Research. The Podcast Consumer 2026. (June 4, 2026). https://www.edisonresearch.com/the-podcast-consumer-2026/.

Teaching the Hero’s Journey with YA and Middle Grades Literature

8/5/2026

Meet our Contributor: Margaret A. Robbins, PhD

Teaching the Hero’s Journey with YA and Middle Grades Literature
by Dr. Margaret A. Robbins, PhD

The hero’s journey is a well-regarded and well-established story structure. Many educators and writers tend to associate it more with science fiction, fantasy, and other forms of speculative fiction, or otherworldly fiction. While it fits very neatly with speculative fiction, the hero’s journey can also work well with realistic and historical fiction, though sometimes with slight alterations. The two main texts I have recently used to teach the Hero’s Journey in Grade 7 Humanities are The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins and Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson. It’s rewarding to see students apply this plot concept to the specific texts we have read.

The Hunger Games

Of the two novels, The Hunger Games is the one that more traditionally follows this story structure, and it’s encouraging to see Katniss Everdeen and other empowered female protagonists take the lead in dystopian literature, which is a trend I’ve noted in some of my other work over the past ten years. In our class discussions of the novel, my students have pointed out that while Katniss has an “ordinary world” in District 12 and a “call to adventure” at the reaping, she does not fully refuse the call because she volunteers to participate in the Hunger Games to save Prim from a brutal fate. She does, however, show hesitation, particularly when she has to say goodbye to Gale and her family and is forced to board the train, along with Peeta, to the Capitol. The Panem primary city, known as The Capitol, is an extended metaphor for an extreme form of capitalism in which only the very wealthy can succeed and thrive, while many residents in the districts struggle to survive.

As the story progresses, the hero’s journey continues. Katniss and Peeta have a “meeting with the mentor” with Effie Trinkett and Haymitch Abernathy on the train, although Katniss also meets a very crucial mentor, Cinna, a little bit later in the story. When the train parks in the Capital city, Katniss crosses the threshold into a world she’s unfamiliar with and where most of her adventures will take place. Most students agree that Katniss’s “test, allies, and enemies” begin with the tributes being evaluated, when she gets to scope out her competition. The innermost cave is entering the arena itself. Students have had differing perspectives on “The Ordeal” and “The Reward,” but the consensus has been that the ordeal is the games themselves, particularly the final showdown with Cato, and the reward is when Katniss and Peeta finally win the games.

Arguably, the road back is when Katniss prepares to go home, and “the resurrection” is when Katniss tells the stretched truth on national television, which is that she was so madly in love with Peeta that she wasn’t thinking straight with the berries stunt that allowed both her and Peeta to win the Hunger Games, albeit to the dismay of President Snow, Panem’s corrupt leader. The audience seems to buy it, at least for the time being. President Snow seems less convinced, and that’s a plot point that gets more developed in the second novel of the series, Catching Fire. The Return with the Elixir occurs when Katniss and Peeta return to District 12, though they both have to accept the fact that their relationship, along with their relationships with others, will be different.

Chains

One of the beauties of Laurie Halse Anderson’s novel Chains is that it shakes up the traditional heroes and villains archetypes, at least to a degree. In many writings and stories about the Revolutionary War, American readers often perceive the Patriots as the “good guys” and the Tories/Loyalists as the “bad guys.” However, as a reader, I felt at least some sympathy for some of the Loyalist characters and questioned the motivations of some of the Patriots. I think that is part of what makes Halse Anderson a great writer: Even when writing a novel that follows some traditional elements of the hero’s journey, the reader still questions the good guy vs. bad guy binary, at least in terms of wars and political situations. In a politically polarized moment, it is even more important to question such binaries.

At the beginning of the novel, Isabel and her sister Ruth had lived in slavery; their owner was kinder to them than many others. However, they lost both of their parents and did not have their freedom or certainty about what their future held, so they are subjugated. When Mr. Finch, their former owner’s crooked nephew, sells the girls to Mr. and Mrs. Lockton of New York against their will, they are forced on a “call to adventure” they can’t refuse, even after a family friend named Jenny tries to buy them, but can’t afford to outbid the very affluent loyalist Locktons. Additionally, Miss Mary Finch had promised both girls their freedom in her will, but her nephew Robert refuses to acknowledge this and will not allow Isabel or anyone else to see the will.

Isabel has a few figures in the novel who serve as mentors, such as Curzon and Lady Seymour, Mr. Lockton’s kind elderly aunt. Yet Curzon and his owner, Patriot soldier Mr. Bellingham, sometimes cannot keep the promises they make to Isabel for spying on the Locktons, so the reader questions Curzon’s motivations as a mentor figure.

When Isabel and her younger, more naive sister Ruth arrive in New York, they cross the threshold of unfamiliarity. Their main enemy, and the one most strongly disliked by my students, is Madame Lockton. She is cruel and unreasonable to both girls, particularly toward the willful Isabel. Becky Barry is the family’s indentured servant and tries to be their ally. But although she tries to protect the girls from Mrs. Lockton's wrath, she sometimes steps back to avoid conflict, making her role as an ally inconsistent. Mr. Lockton is more rational than his wife in the way he treats the family’s slaves and servants. However, his dangerous secrets, including his involvement in an assassination plan on George Washington, bring danger to everyone who lives in his home, ultimately making him more of an enemy. Additionally, he does not treat his wife well, which adds fuel to the fire.

I would argue that the most trustworthy mentor for Isabel is “Grandfather,” the elderly enslaved Black man at the well who advises her against claiming herself as a “Patriot” or a “Loyalist,” and instead urges her to pursue her own freedom. His metaphor of finding the River Jordan is an important one related to the quest for freedom. Although Madame Lockton is a vile enemy, I would argue that the worst enemy of the book is the institution of slavery.

The innermost cave could arguably be Lockton’s home, and the ordeal is likely when Mrs. Lockton and Isabel have a particularly harsh encounter, and Mrs. Lockton has Isabel branded with the letter “I” for insolence. As is the case with many series novels, the “Road Back,” the “Resurrection,” and the “Return with the Elixir” might not be fully realized until the second or third book. Halse Anderson’s “Seeds of America” series continues with the books Forge and Ashes. At the end of Chains, Isabel escapes with Curzon with the intent of finding Isabel, who was sold down south by Mrs. Lockton. Although the next steps of her journey are unclear at the end of Chains, Isabel makes the empowering last name change from Lockton, forced upon her by Madame Lockton, to Gardener, in honor of her mother, who loved the outdoors, and to claim her freedom by refusing her past names of Finch and Lockton. We, as readers, do not know what is next for Isabel, Curzon, and Ruth, but we do know that Isabel is determined to find her freedom, along with Ruth’s.

Even though the “allies and enemies” in Chains are sometimes questionable and in flux, Isabel has a consistent quest for freedom throughout the story. Perhaps it is good for young adolescents to understand that sometimes, there’s no clear enemy or ally in a story. Sometimes the roles shift, and one has to figure out whom to trust on the journey to self-discovery and freedom. Over time in the first novel, Isabel learns to trust herself first and others second.

Complexities of The Hero's Journey

The Hero’s Journey is not always entirely linear or traditional in fiction. However, Joseph Campbell’s story structure is an important tool for better understanding narrative and plot arcs. For students who do well with visual manipulatives, they can create posters of the hero’s journey and/or the traditional, popular plot diagram and apply it to the stories they read. Analyzing both the hero’s journey and the plot diagram can help students see how plot and characters work together to tell compelling stories. Overall, understanding the hero’s journey is important for better understanding the story arc and how it works with characterization to tell a compelling story. Through writing prompts and discussions, students can also reflect on their own present and potential future hero’s journeys.

References

Anderson, L. H. (2008). Chains. Atheneum Books for Young Readers.

Collins, S. (2008). The hunger games. Scholastic Press.

Docimo, K., & Littlehale, K. (n.d.). Plot diagram: Story structure, examples & templates.

Storyboard That. https://www.storyboardthat.com/articles/e/plot-diagram

Villirilli, D. (2025, October 14). The hero's journey: 12 steps to a classic story structure. Reedsy.
https://reedsy.com/blog/guide/story-structure/heros-journey/

Read Any Good Dissertations, Lately?

7/29/2026

Jeffrey S. Kaplan, PhD, is Associate Professor Emeritus in the School of Teaching, Learning, and Leadership in the College of Community Innovation and Education, University of Central Florida, Orlando and Senior Adjunct Professor/Dissertation Chair/Methodologist for College of Doctoral Studies, Grand Canyon University, Phoenix, Arizona. His research interests include the teaching of reading and writing, and specifically the teaching of young adult literature across the curriculum. Dr. Kaplan is Past President of the Assembly on Literature for Adolescents (2012-13), a division of the National Council Teachers of English and the co-editor of Teaching Young Adult Literature Today: Insights, Considerations and Perspectives for the Classroom Teacher (Rowman & Littlefield, 2012, 2016) and Chair National Council Teachers of English Standing Committee Against Censorship (2014-17). He can be reached at [email protected]

Read Any Good Dissertations, Lately? by Jeffrey S. Kaplan

Read any good dissertations, lately? I have. In my retirement (achem) years, I spend my days reading, writing, traveling, hiking, walking, and reading dissertations. As an adjunct faculty member with the College of Doctoral Studies of Grand Canyon University (Phoenix, Arizona), I have the privilege and honor of working with graduate students pursuing a doctoral degree. Although the disciplines vary, the objective is always the same – the pursuit of a noble idea.

As a faculty member for nearly thirty years in the College of Education and Community Innovation at the University of Central Florida, Orlando, I taught undergraduate and graduate students preparing to become teachers, administrators, and educational leaders. I served on honors thesis and dissertation committees, each underscored by dedicated students and teachers empowered with the notion – that ‘truth’ matters. The pursuit of scholarship – for the sake of scholarship is a lonely pursuit – but that doesn’t make it any less noble or worthy.

I bring the notion of ‘truth’ and ‘nobility’ up for a reason. We are under attack. Scholars, academics, and students – all desiring to know more about their subject matter – and to separate what is known from what is not known – are seemingly treading water in an arena where ‘truth’ becomes susceptible to public opinion. And ‘public opinion’ becomes subject to ‘whim.’

Do you think it is true? Well so, be it.

What does this have to do with young adult literature? Plenty.

I have always been attracted to people who have gone to the wall for an ‘idea.’ Money is important – and we all know that when it comes to paying the ‘rent’, noble ideas can always go so far. But when it comes to exploring the truth – and those who have the privilege to do so – academics, scientists, reporters, - the pursuit of the truth is an ambition filled with complexity and desire that few can dispute has merit beyond words
.
To stand next to someone who has devoted their life to an idea – no matter how tenuous and vague that idea might be – is awesome. Where would we be without Galileo? Einstein? Martin Luther King, Jr? Judy Blume? Or Robert Cormier?

Robert Cormeir

Robert Cormier, you say? Robert Cormier was an American writer and journalist (1925 – 2000) known primarily for his ground-breaking novel, The Chocolate War (Pantheon Books, 1974) about one teen’s lonely and embattled quest to defy a request to comply with his private school’s culture and fundraiser. Refusing to sell chocolates for an annual school fundraising event, Jerry, a freshman attending a fictional Catholic high school, defies convention and refuses to sell – in direct confrontation to students and an administrator who he senses is using intimidation to force his cooperation.

Because of The Chocolate War’s frank language, violence, and sexual ponderings, this haunting fictional work of adolescent angst remains consistently on the lists of top challenged books for young adults. After all, open defiance of cultural norms is always a safe bet for having a book land on a list of works most censored by adults refusing to let kids reads work of significant consequence. And this work was no exception.

(I know. My mother, a seventh-grade English teacher, taught this book to her students – but not before receiving permission from her administrators and parents alike. Better to be safe, than jobless..)

Dissertations and the Pursuit of Truth

And so it is with scholarship. The truth matters. I chair and review dissertations – whether they be in education, health, psychology, or business – that for the most part, research issues of social justice. The students I work with – many of them educators, nurses, social workers, business owners, and the like – are all imbued with a sense of purpose and desire to pursue a noble ambition for its own sake. They want to make their mark in the world – by researching, writing, and sharing – a personal and professional pursuit of their version of what is true and right and just.

And nothing could be ‘nobler.’

The same is true with the many educators and scholars I have known who are devoted to the study of young adult literature. Their lives – and their stories – remain most impressive to both those who know them well – and those who know them for the good work they have done – and continue to do. They – meaning the professionals who share at local, state and national conferences – and contribute to state, national, and international peer-reviewed journals – do so not for monetary reward – or even recognition – but, for the glory of sharing the truth to those who care – and those who aspire to do the same.

Dissertation writing is not an easy task. As I tell my students, writing a dissertation is a long, technical document – which comes with its own vagaries and stylistic peculiarities. No two dissertations are the same and no two dissertations will remain immutable. Research is always changing – and today’s version of what is true and good is always changing. What we know today to be relevant and real, will often be surpassed tomorrow by a new discovery or new author.

Yet, what remains constant is the pursuit of the ‘truth.’ And what that means to our field of study – young adult literature and the teaching of young adult literature – is our guiding “north star.’ True, our teaching is always being challenged – but our vision of what is true and good is always noble and worth pursuing.

Recent Dissertations about Young Adult Literature

A quick glance at the handful of recent dissertations about literature for adolescents reveals how immutable scholarship can and should be. For how intriguing these titles are:

Falling Down the Stairs & Finding Vitality: Exploring Student Response to Banned Books Through Political, Feminist, & Schoolish Discourses in a High School Book Club
Priske, Katie
The University of Iowa ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2025. 32164571.

Emerging Agency in Caribbean Young Adult Literature
Ramos Muñoz, Elvin
University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras (Puerto Rico) ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2025. 32400182.

“It’s Time to Get Personal”: Cultivating Spaces of Acompañamiento With Latinx Youth Through Latinx Young Adult Literature Book Clubs
Saco, Sandra Mariella
Arizona State University ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2025. 31997904.

Drawing the Line: Visible and Invisible Disability, Identity, and Intersectionality in Award-Winning Graphic Novels for Teens
Nixon, Gwendolyn C
The University of Alabama ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2025. 32118113.

So that it Might Be Different For You: The Intersection of Adolescents/CE, Legal Culture, and Sexual Violence in Young Adult Literature
Fine, Jamie M
. Stanford University ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2023. 31049681.

Storytelling, Identity Development, and Decolonial Pedagogies: Frameworks for Teaching Indigenous Literatures of the Great Lakes to Young Adult Readers
Cary, Katie M
. The University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2022. 29208295.

And these are only a handful of powerful and recent dissertations that can be found online – most notably in the dissertation search engine – ProQuest. Each dissertation is worthy of our applause – and each worthy of skimming, perusing, highlighting, and sharing – for the insights they provide for our knowledge, our profession, and our understanding of what makes a more human and empathetic society of learners in pursuit of what is true and good for young people.

Unsung Scholars

The same is true for the unsung scholars – leaders in the field of young adult literature – who put pen to paper (so to speak) – and illuminate what they know to be true and good and insightful – about the study of ‘good books for good kids.’

There are many, many seminal works about the study of young adult literature that deserve our praise. They deserve commendation for the comfort they bring us and the insights they share about what it means to be a scholar of reading for adolescents. Some of the innumerable notable works include:

Literature for Today’s Young Adults (Pearson, 2012) by Alleen Nilsen, James Blasingame, Kenneth Donelson, Don Nilsen

How Young Adult Literature Gets Taught (Routledge, 2022) edited by Steven Bickmore, T. Hunter Strickland, and Stacy Gaber

Identity, Criticality, and Advocacy in Young Adult Literature (Routledge, 2026) edited by Stefany Comfort Maher and Alice Hays

The Oxford Handbook of Young Adult Literature (Oxford University Press, 2026) edited by Victor Malo-Juvera and Crag Hill.

Young Adult Literature in Action (Bloomsbury, 2026) by Rose Brock

As said, I have mentioned are only a few of the numerous books, dissertation, monographs, research articles, opinion pieces, and the like by emerging and established scholars. These everyday heroes spend their days (and evenings) working tirelessly to spread their concept of the ‘truth’ about the power and agency involved in studying and advocating reading for adolescents. There is no immediate reward or glory in their pursuit – only the satisfaction of a job well-done.

There is ‘no golden rainbow’ or “corner office with a panoramic view’ waiting for my dissertation students when they finish their research. Often, they return to the same position they had when they started. Teachers return to their classrooms, nurses return to their rounds, social workers to their casework, etc.; they simply leave with the satisfaction of a job well done – and the feeling that they have accomplished something ‘noble.’

In Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War, Jerry, our young hero, is inspired to rebel against his conspiring and cruelly manipulative school pranksters and one accommodating vice-principal. Inside his school locker hangs the inspiring quote by the renowned T. S. Eliot– “Do I dare disturb the universe?”

And indeed, he does. And so do the many educators of young adult literature in pursuit of the truth.

Are We Canning the Laughs?: A Brief Investigation of the Current Landscape of Humorous YA Literature

7/22/2026

Meet our Contributor: Natalie Tate

Natalie Tate is a Brigham Young University master's student whose interests include children's literature, young adult literature, folktale studies, and environmental criticism. She received her undergrad in English from BYU and a master of library science from Texas Woman's University. She is currently the editing director of Whirligig, a new BYU children’s magazine, and loves to spend her free time with her two best friends (who also happen to be her husband and 20-month-old son).

Are We Canning the Laughs?: A Brief Investigation of the Current Landscape of Humorous YA Literature by Natalie Tate

From my earliest days as a reader, I was drawn to books that made me laugh. I remember having my mother read Sandra Boynton’s Blue Hat, Green Hat over and over. I couldn’t get enough of the turkey who—oops!—inevitably wore his clothes wrong. As a teen, I read every single book Janette Rallison penned. I read her humorous rom-coms, especially It’s a Mall World After All, over and over again. And a love of humor continues to stay with me through my adult years. On our honeymoon, my husband and I read Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) together, sometimes laughing so hard together that we cried. But as I’ve reflected on humorous contemporary teen novels, I’ve mostly come up dry.

My youngest sister, still a teen, asked me recently about humorous young adult books similar to My Lady Jane. She confided that this was the type of funny that she wanted to read more of but that it seemed impossible to find. What I think she was looking for, and what I’ve constrained my search to find, is books in which humor is a major element—books that, if giving a summary, inevitably include the word “funny” in the description. (Although I realize that my definition of what constitutes a “funny” book is somewhat simplistic, I feel that it serves my purposes within this brief investigation.) I had a hunch that my sister was on to something when she expressed the difficulty of her funny YA book search. Where were the funny books for teens? And that’s what led to this investigation into the world of humor in contemporary young adult literature.

Has the Funny Dwindled?

Back in 2000, librarian Teri Lesesne opined that younger readers had an ample array of humorous literature, but that it was in “terribly short supply” for middle-grade and high school students (p. 60). That was 26 years ago, and for middle-grade students in the decades since then, humorous literature has become particularly notable. For example, bestsellers include Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Raina Telgemeier’s Smile, Lincoln Peirce’s Big Nate, Dana Simpson’s Phoebe and Her Unicorn, Tom Angleberger’s Origami Yoda, and Rachel Renée Russell’s Dork Diaries. Yet, while humorous literature for middle-graders has become plentiful, I haven’t noticed a similar shift in young adult literature.

In 2010, librarian Alison Follos opined that “humor is the missing ingredient in middle and high school education” but that it’s not the type of book with which teachers and librarians “overload [their] stacks” (p. 37). In a short article from Kirkus in 2018, one YA editor wrote of fond memories of humorous YA lit from her youth, but remarked that these days, “funny young adult books are strangely thin on the ground” (Simeon, para. 2). And in the recent 2022 SLJ article “Show Me the Funny,” Emily Mroczek-Bayci remarked that “doom, gloom, and romance” are what take up most of the shelves in the YA section, leaving little room for anything else, let alone humor. The librarians cited in her article beg publishers for more humorous YA lit, feeling it has dwindled over the years (pp. 30–32). The professionals—librarians, publishers, and reviewers alike—all articulate a lack of humorous young adult literature as both a present reality and as a problem to be solved.

Is It Because Teens Don’t Like Humorous Books Anymore?

To tackle this first possibility, I looked for any recent studies that could tell me about teens’ reading preferences regarding humor. Unfortunately, data is limited. The most recent “evidence” purporting teens’ preference for humor is from 2022, and the evidence is anecdotal. Librarians point to the enormous popularity of humorous middle-grade books—for example, the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, which has spent hundreds of weeks at the top of the NYT bestsellers list—and argue that kids’ love of humor doesn’t suddenly disappear when they hit teenage status (Mroczek-Bayci, 2022, p. 30).

The next discussion of humor and teens that I found was from an entire decade earlier. A casual 2012 report looked at twelve- to eighteen-year-olds in one book club who self-selected books to review. The books that teens said were funny were more than twice as likely to be reviewed as the books they said were sad. Since self-selection implies favoritism, the author determined that the teens were drawn to funny literature (Herald, p. 216). In 2009, Publisher’s Weekly surveyed teens to determine their reading preferences. Sadly, the survey failed to ask about humor. However, in a subsection asking about favorite elements of graphic novels and manga, teenage responders picked humor as their second favorite element, only defeated in the polls by romance (Fitzgerald, p. 23). While there’s scholarly literature about teens’ relationship with humor from the ‘80s, ‘90s, and ‘00s, it seems to have almost completely disappeared in the last 15 years. Why have scholars stopped surveying teens to determine what they like to read?

One possibility is that we’ve pivoted to sales numbers to determine young adult preferences. Yet, there may be serious issues with this approach: According to WordsRated statistics from January 2023, 55% of YA lit buyers are over 18 years old. And lest one believe this crowd is buying YA lit for the teens in their lives, 78% of them say they’re buying it for themselves. If publishers, librarians, teachers, authors, and scholars are looking to sales to determine what teens like, they’re making a mistake. What they’re really seeing is the reading preferences of adults. In fact, of the YA lit buyers over 18, 51% are between 30 and 45 years old (Curcic, “YA consumer structure”). Maybe it’s naïve to believe that publishers should consider something more than sales statistics when determining what YA lit to offer. And yet, shouldn’t young adults’ book tastes be important to YA publishing divisions? Teens’ book preferences seem to be ignored or, at best, only partially considered. Noting this lack of teenage preferences should be important for us, especially if we are hoping to listen to and be respectful of teenage wishes.

Is It Because Publishers Don’t Want to Publish Humorous Books?

I begin this section with an anecdote from a colleague who is a published author. This colleague wrote a funny story that he submitted to publishers, but none of them chose to pursue his manuscript. The response was either, “I thought it was hilarious, but the rest of my team didn’t get it,” or “My team thought it was funny but I didn’t get it.” If everyone at the table doesn’t find the manuscript funny, publishers may fear that it won’t land with teens. But humor isn’t one-size-fits-all. Young adult author David Lubar explains it well:

Tragedy is universal. Comedy is subjective. If a novelist throws a dog under the wheels of a truck, every reader will feel sad. If the truck is an Oscar Mayer Weenermobile, some people might find that funny. If the hot dog truck swerves, misses the dog, and runs over a pack of PETA members, a different group of readers might be amused (Gill, 2007, p. 63).

If publishers are waiting for the funny book that pleases everyone, they’re going to be waiting for a long time.

And yet, as stated earlier, unabashedly humorous middle-grade fiction is immensely popular. In an article published in February of 2024, Publisher’s Weekly observes the year’s trending topics in books for children and YA. Unsurprisingly, “books with humor have been popping” (O’Sullivan, 2024, “Tracking trends”). Yet, PW only mentions this trend with an eye toward picture books and middle-grade graphic novels. Although unabashedly humorous books for teens would surely be written differently than unabashedly humorous books for middle-grade kids, if humor is trending in middle-grade, I can’t help but wonder why publishers don’t see its potential popularity for teens.

Admittedly, I had difficulty finding answers to this question. One lead was an editorial piece about humorous novels for adults published in the UK. The editorial opined that despite humorous literature’s “enormous popularity with readers,” publishers are cautious. Why? Because while humor can be funny, some people can also find it offensive (Larman, 2020, para. 4). An author writing a character who tells an off-color joke may be criticized as sharing their character’s viewpoint. No publisher wants to be accused of promoting hate speech, an allegation that could spin out of control and cause serious damage to the reputation of a publishing house.

And yet, if causing offense is the worry, Alleen and Don Nilsen—the godparents of academic humor studies in the US—believe that this can be avoided. In their “Humane Humor Rules,” they provide the following guidelines:

A. Never target the victim,
B. Always target an individual’s strength, not weakness,
C. Never target a quality that a person can’t change (such as gender, ethnicity, etc.),
D. For tragedies and major embarrassments, allow for emotional and temporal distancing,
E. Don’t offend your audience; sometimes self-censoring is necessary (Wilkie, p. 116).

It’s true—humor can hurt and demean others but, if used appropriately, laughter can also be healing.

Is It Because Librarians Don’t Like Humor?

Recently, I attended a lecture about teaching YA lit to college students. The professor talked about a new difficulty in her YA lit class—namely, that a large percentage of students didn’t manage to read the required YA books, citing seasonal depression and the books’ triggering content. All of the books on the professor’s required list addressed important issues like the Holocaust, rape, and racism. All of the books were also well-respected pieces of YA lit. Reassuring her students that all of the books ended hopefully didn’t seem to help. Another colleague at the lecture, knowing that I was studying funny YA lit, asked if I knew of any funny books that could mitigate the effects of so many serious, difficult books. “Is there actually any funny YA out there that’s literary enough to add?” the lecturing professor asked. She seemed surprised when I told her that there were several I could recommend.

The sentiment that funny books are neither educational nor literary isn’t new. In her 2010 article, librarian Alison Follos dared other librarians to help change the perception that humor is lesser literature. “Clever wit,” she added, “often addresses the most compelling themes” (p. 37). Take Libba Bray’s Beauty Queens, for example. The author self-describes the book as a discussion of misogyny, corporate influence in American politics, the commodification of society, society’s homogenization, and the effects of these topics on teens’ “self-esteem, racial and cultural identity, sexual orientation, gender expectations, and unrealistic norms of beauty” (Herald, 2012, p. 217). Hearing this list of heavy topics, you might assume that Bray wrote a very heavy piece of fiction. Yet, according to the review journals, this book was a clever, funny literary success, its difficult themes written in a highly readable story about teen beauty queens stranded on an island (Dobrez, 2011; Heppermann, 2011; Kirkus, 2011; Publisher’s Weekly, 2011; Tran, 2011).

In exploring librarians’ perceptions of humorous YA lit, I also decided to take a look at Printz Award winners and honor titles. The Printz Award is one of the most prestigious awards for YA books, awarded yearly by the American Library Association to a title that exemplifies literary excellence. Since its establishment in 2000, the award has had 27 winners and 111 honor titles. I wanted to know how often, if ever, the Printz had been awarded to funny books. Since I couldn’t read each title myself, I used professional book reviews and reader reviews from Goodreads to decide whether the books I hadn’t already read merited a place on the funny list. I looked at top reader tags like “funny” and “humor” to determine whether readers thought that humor was a major element in each title.

I found that in the award’s 25-year history, two humorous YA books were winners: Going Bovine in 2010 and American Born Chinese in 2007. Additionally, ten humorous books were honor titles over the years: Grasshopper Jungle in 2015, Dodger in 2013, Tales of the Madman Underground in 2010, both The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks and Nation in 2009, Repossessed in 2008, An Abundance of Katherines in 2007, both Fat Kid Rules the World and The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things in 2004, and Angus, Thongs, and Full Frontal Snogging in 2001. In total, twelve funny YA books have managed to make it to the top of a prestigious literary list. The Printz committees responsible for recognizing these titles didn’t find humorous YA lit synonymous with lesser literature. Yes, funny and literary YA books do exist and are acknowledged by the librarian community.

I did find it interesting to compare the frequency of humorous lit that made the list in the ‘00s (7 titles) with the past ten years (0 titles). The difference felt substantial. But librarians have already proved that they would give the Printz to humorous titles that merited it. I suspected that the lack of humorous titles winning the Printz in the past ten years may have had more to do with a decrease in the number of humorous books being published than from librarians’ sudden distaste for humor.

Is It Because Authors Aren’t Writing Humor?

In editor Laura Simeon’s short article from 2018, she began with recent news regarding the Wodehouse Prize. The Wodehouse Prize is arguably the most prestigious award given to authors of humorous literature for adults. In 2018, the judges announced that no book submitted that year had been funny enough to merit a place on the shortlist, let alone declared the winner. Simeon wondered if the lack of humorous literature (such as her favorite book as a teen, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾ was “a sign of our times” (para. 1). A discussion of the 2018 Wodehouse prize ordeal found in The Guardian posited another interesting insight: that while lighthearted, carefree Wodehousian comedy is on the decline, authors are still writing books that have funny parts—they’re just primarily about dark and unhappy subject matter (McAloon, 2018, para. 2). It felt to me like Simeon and The Guardian were saying something important.

To test this theory, I decided to study the YA books of fiction that I’d read with publication dates from within the last 15 years—196 books in total. Then, I starred books that I’d reviewed that included words like “laughed,” “funny,” and “humor.” There were 19 YA titles that included something I found funny—this amounted to 11% of the 196 books. Of these 19 titles, 9 included difficult subject matter: death of parent(s), cancer, antisemitism, gun violence, depression, grief, body shaming, racism, islamophobia, ableism, physical abuse, verbal abuse, poverty, and death of a friend. Of the other 10 titles, 7 were recommended for middle-graders and younger teens. Only 3 humorous YA titles recommended for teens of all ages did not include difficult subject matter, two of them written by the same authors (Appendix).

The humor found in the young adult books that I’d been reading seemed to corroborate The Guardian’s insight: Authors had been writing humor in the past 10 years—I just hadn’t noticed because the books were primarily focused on dark subject matter. Of course, YA lit that tackles difficult subject matter with a sprinkling of humor isn’t anything new. For example, Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, a humorous YA novel about two wisecracking outcasts—one who is dealing with serious parental abuse—was a hit in 1993. The Pigman, another humorous YA novel, again about two funny teen outcasts who tragically burn bridges with their only adult friend, was published in 1968. I could add many, many others. YA lit that tackles difficult subjects with humor may be on the decline, but it doesn’t seem to be endangered. This is wonderful news! Author Joan Bauer notes that humor can breach topics that are “fiercely serious” and can bring teens “hope and redemption” (Lesesne, 2000). It’s comforting to know there are recently published books for teens that find humor, even in trying circumstances. Teens, and all of us, can appreciate a little uplift in difficult situations.

Yet lighthearted, carefree humor for teens of all ages (for example, books like A Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag or Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging) seems to have become exceedingly difficult to find since the 2010s. Some might argue that this type of YA literature doesn’t provide a mirror to the realities of a contemporary teen’s life, that it’s not as important for teens as funny YA lit that addresses hard topics. But sometimes, teens may want a break from the mirror and from the “death, doom, and depression” of other books. They want to laugh without reservations. If we take away humorous YA escapism, we take away an outlet (Cart, 1998; Vanesse, 2000).

Curiously, several authors known in the past for their humorous YA escapism have disappeared from the YA sphere. Gordon Korman’s last YA novel, The Juvie Three, was published in 2008. Since then, he’s continued writing funny novels, but each one is firmly entrenched in middle grade. Janette Rallison, whose YA rom-coms were in high demand in the ‘00s, seems to have left YA behind and moved exclusively into adult chick lit. Maybe these authors and others like them got tired of writing YA and were looking for something new, or maybe publishers or the market itself pushed them out. In any case, there’s a hole on the shelf. Teens need authors and publishers to reinstate humorous YA escapism.

Areas for Further Study and Concluding Thoughts

Admittedly, my investigation of the current humorous YA lit climate has been brief and incomplete. Still, it has raised important questions: Where are the current studies about teens’ reading preferences? Is it possible for teen preferences to be given priority in the current market? Why the seeming reluctance to publish light, escapist humor in YA lit despite its enormous popularity for middle- and grade-school students? We still have work to do to answer these important questions. I’m grateful to the many teachers, librarians, and scholars in the past who have dedicated their time to understanding humorous YA lit. Now it’s our turn to fill the gap.

References

Cart, M. (1998). Carte blanche: What’s so funny? Booklist, 95(8), 742.

Curcic, D. (2023, January 30). Young adult book sales statistics. WordsRated. https://wordsrated.com/young-adult-book-sales/

Dobrez, C. (2011). Beauty queens. Booklist, 107(18), 46.

Fitzgerald, C. (2009). What do teens want? Publisher’s Weekly, 256(43), 22–26.

Follos, A. M. G. (2010). Taking humor seriously. Library Media Connection, 28(4), 36–37.

Gill, D. (2007). True talent: An interview with David Lubar. Teacher Librarian, 34(5), 62–63.

Heppermann, C. M. (2011). Beauty queens. Horn Book Magazine, 87(4), 140–141.

Herald, D. T. (2012). A funny thing happened. Voice of Youth Advocates, 35(3), 216–218.

Kirkus Reviews. (2011). Beauty queens. Kirkus Reviews, 79(8), p. 677.

Larman, A. (2020, May 5). Where is the Waugh or Wodehouse of our time? The Critic. https://thecritic.co.uk/where-is-the-waugh-or-wodehouse-of-our-time/

Lesesne, T. S. (2000). A passion for humor: An interview with Joan Bauer. Teacher Librarian, 27(3), 60–62.

McAloon, J. (2018, May 17). Fiction remains funny – the best comedy is found in dark, unhappy novels. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/17/fiction-wodehouse-prize-comic-novels

Mroczek-Bayci, E. (2022). Show me the funny. School Library Journal, 68(6), 30–33.

O’Sullivan, J. (2024, February 2). What’s ahead for kids’ books in 2024? Publisher’s Weekly. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-industry-news/article/94246-2024-children-s-publishing-outlook.html

Publisher’s Weekly. (2011). Children’s books: Fiction. Publisher’s Weekly, 258(45), 39–44.

Simeon, L. (2018, June 17). Where are all the funny YA novels? Kirkus Reviews. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/news-and-features/articles/where-are-all-funny-ya-novels/

Tran, A. (2011). Beauty queens. School Library Journal, 57(7), 92–93.

Vanesse, D. (2000). On taking ourselves too seriously, and other tragic mistakes. The ALAN Review, 27(2), 27–28. https://doi.org/10.21061/alan.v27i2.a.7

Wilkie, I. (2021). Short interviews. Comedy Studies, 12(1), 115–119. https://doi.org/10.1080/2040610X.2020.1850099

Book References

Angleberger, T. (2010). The strange case of origami Yoda. Amulet.

Barnes, J. (2009). Tales of the madman underground. Viking Books for Young Readers.

Boynton, S. (1984). Blue hat, green hat. Boynton Bookworks.

Bray, L. (2009). Going bovine. Delacorte Books for Young Readers.

Bray, L. (2011). Beauty queens. Scholastic.

Crutcher, C. (1993). Staying fat for Sarah Byrnes. Greenwillow Books.

Going, K. L. (2003). Fat kid rules the world. Penguin Books.

Green, J. (2006). An abundance of Katherines. Dutton Books for Young Readers.

Hand, C., Ashton, B., & Meadows, J. (2016). My lady Jane. HarperTeen.

Jenkins, A. M. (2007). Repossessed. HarperTeen.

Jerome, J. K. (1889). Three men in a boat (to say nothing of the dog). J. W. Arrowsmith.

Kinney, J. (2007). Diary of a wimpy kid. Amulet.

Korman, G. (1987). A semester in the life of a garbage bag. Scholastic.

Korman, G. (2008). The juvie three. Hyperion Book.

Lockhart, E. (2008). The disreputable history of Frankie Landau-Banks. Little, Brown Books for Young Readers.

Mackler, C. (2003). The earth, my butt, and other big round things. Candlewick Press.

Peirce, L. (2010). Big Nate: In a class by himself. HarperCollins.

Pratchett, T. (2008). Nation. Doubleday.

Pratchett, T. (2012). Dodger. HarperCollins.

Rallison, J. (2006). It’s a mall world after all. Walker Books for Young Readers.

Rennison, L. (1999). Angus, thongs, and full frontal snogging. Piccadilly Press.

Russell, R. R. (2009). Dork diaries: Tales from a not-so-fabulous life. Aladdin.

Simpson, D. (2014). Phoebe and her unicorn. Andrews McMeel.

Smith, A. (2014). Grasshopper jungle. Dutton Books.

Telgemeier, R. (2009). Smile. Scholastic Graphix.

Townsend, S. (1982). The secret diary of Adrian Mole, aged 13¾. Methuen Books.

Yang, G. L. (2006). American born Chinese. First Second.

Zindel, P. (1968). The pigman. Bantam Books.

Appendix
YA Books with Heavy Themes and Humor that I’ve Read (Published in the Last 15 Years):

Blum, I. (2022). The life and crimes of Hoodie Rosen. Philomel Books.

Bowling, D. (2017). Insignificant events in the life of a cactus. Sterling Children’s Books.

Ellis, A. D. (2014). The end or something like that. Dial Books.

Feder, T. (2020). Dancing at the pity party: A dead mom graphic memoir. Dial Books.

Murphy, J. (2015). Dumplin’. Balzer + Bray.

Nayeri, D. (2020). Everything sad is untrue: (A true story). Levine Querido.

Reilly, K. J. (2021). Four for the road. Atheneum Books for Young Readers.

Schmidt, G. D. (2023). The labors of Hercules Beale. Clarion Books.

Stevenson, N. (2015). Nimona. HarperTeen.

Appendix
Funny YA Books I’ve Read (Published in the Last 15 Years):

Craft, J. (2018). New kid. Quill Tree Books. (Younger teens)

Craft, J. (2020). Class act. Quill Tree Books. (Younger teens)

Fahmy, H. (2021). Huda F are you? Dial Books.*

Hand, C., Ashton, B., & Meadows, J. (2016). My lady Jane. HarperTeen.*

Hand, C., Ashton, B., & Meadows, J. (2021). My contrary Mary. HarperTeen.*

Martín, P. (2023). Mexikid. Dial Books. (Younger teens)

Morita, K. (2020). I’ve been killing slimes for 300 years and maxed out my level. Yen Press. (Younger teens)

Muth, J. J. (2019). Stanislaw Lem’s the seventh voyage. Graphix. (Younger teens)

Santat, D. (2023). A first time for everything. First Second. (Younger teens)

Stroud, J. (2021). The outlaws Scarlett and Browne. Knopf Books for Young Readers. (Younger teens)

Trojan Horses and Real Talk with Rex Ogle

7/15/2026

Meet our Contributor:

Julie Hoffman, Ed.D. (@HoffieCup) is a Literacy and Social Studies Teacher Instructional Leader (TIL) with Springfield Public Schools. She is also an adjunct professor in the Teacher Education Program and the Department of English and Modern Languages at University of Illinois Springfield. She earned her Doctor of Education in literacy from Judson University in 2018. She is currently President of the Illinois Reading Council (IRC). Her research interests include urban education, social and emotional learning, young adult literature, poetry, and empathy. She believes that children’s literature and poetry can be a message of perseverance and hope and believes that we thrive when we invest in ourselves and others.

Meet Rex Ogle:

REX OGLE is an award-winning author of more than a hundred books, comics, graphic novels, and memoirs—most notably Free Lunch (winner of the ALA/YALSA award for Excellence in Non-Fiction), Abuela Don’t Forget Me (ALA/YALSA award for Excellence in Non-Fiction finalist), Road Home (a Micheal Printz Honor and Stonewall Honor book), and middle grade graphic novels Four Eyes and Pizza Face.
Under his pseudonym REY TERCIERO, he also re-imagines classics as modern and diverse graphic novels, including Meg, Jo, Beth, & Amy, Northranger (nominated for both Harvey and GLAAD Media Awards), and Dan in Green Gables (nominated for a GLAAD Media Award).
Born and raised in Texas, Rex now lives in Los Angeles where he writes every day—when he’s not reading X-Men, gaming with friends, or chasing his dog, Toby, trying to score a hug.

Trojan Horses and Real Talk with Rex Ogle
An interview by Julie Hoffman with Rex Ogle

Julie: Hi, Rex, Thanks for spending some time with me.

Rex: Hi, it’s good to see you.

Julie: Okay, Let’s dive in. So many books, so little time. I want to focus on your YA, mostly, but I know you have a new book that just came out. Absent. Let’s start with that.

Rex: Well basically, doing all of these school visits— talking to students and teachers and librarians— I was asking, “What are some of the biggest problems kids are facing today?” And it seemed like the two biggest ones right now are not going to school and social media. And I was like, ‘Well, social media is big to tackle. But, I know about not going to school. For me, when I was a kid I was not always able to make it to school because my parents were out looking for jobs. It was my job to take care of my brother who was 10 years younger than me. And of course I'd go to school and my teachers would be like, “You’ve missed two or three days,” and I would be like, “Yeah, and I did all my homework. I can ace the exam.” But they would just frown at me, like, they were really judgy about it. I was so young, and I didn’t have the voice to explain, “Hey, I’m not making it to school for reasons that are out of my hands.”

So I started thinking about that, and came up with the idea for Absent. Three different boys living under the poverty line who cannot make it to school for three different reasons. One because he's being bullied within an inch of his life. One because he has two brothers he has to take care of and he can't make it to school on time. And the third one because his dad's in jail and his favorite teacher quits, so he feels like no one loves him. Because I know some kids aren’t “readers” yet, I wanted to play with the format. Since I already write novels and novels-in-verse and graphic novels, I was like, “Let's put all three in one book.” Three protagonists—three formats. One kid wants to be an artist, so his story is in comic books. One kid wants to be a songwriter, so his story is in rap lyrics. And the third kid wants to be a doctor, so he keeps a journal.

I'm very very excited. I mean, I love all of my books, but this one is just like my little baby.

Julie: I love it! So with the graphic novel part, did you write the text and someone else illustrated it?

Rex: Yes, I cannot draw to save my life. I always work with other artists, and it's good. For the comic book artist it is a Black student, and I was like, “I don't feel comfortable directing exactly how the images will be. I want to find an artist who can convey the relationship between the boy and his father, because I thought that was important. And then, I’m half white and half Mexican, so the other two kids are Mexican and white.

Julie: Yes, yes. What’s funny is that In this conversation I definitely planned to talk through Memoir, and I was also wanting to talk about, like, exploring different formats. So now, well, you just covered all of it! Let’s keep going with Memoir, because I feel like that was kind of the beginning for you. You and I have talked about, well, at least two of your memoirs, so far. I told you how I couldn’t even make it through the foreword of Don't Forget Me, Abuela. We also talked about Road Home, and some of our kindred-spirit stuff. Let’s go back to the beginning and talk about “the Memoir that you didn't want to write” and how that kind of became a place to write your story and it became a place of healing.

Rex: So, as you know, at one point I was like well, I never wanted to write this stuff. I always wanted to be a writer, but I wanted to write fantasy or sci-fi or comic books. I love superheroes! That's the stuff I grew up reading, because with what I was dealing with at home, poverty-domestic-violence-home-instability-food-insecurity-etcectra-etcetera, I needed those books to escape from the real world. So growing up, I wanted to create books for others to read and escape from reality. Reality is a lot sometimes. It can be exhausting. It can be traumatic. It can be heavy. I wanted to give people an escape the way I had an escape.

Coming from where I came from, I didn't think I could do it on my own. I was rejected by all the MFA creative writing programs I applied to, which led me to move to New York City with a thousand bucks and a double bag, and I was like, “I'm going to work in book publishing. I'm going to learn everything about how to be a good writer because, obviously, I don't know.”
So, while I was in New York, I wrote 18 novels and 21 comic book series. Every single one? Rejected. It sucked. But . .. I think it was the Universe pushing me to write something that was not sci-fi, that was not horror, that was not Escapist. It wanted me to write something real, and that's why I wrote Free Lunch. And then you know, my publisher was like, “Do you have any other stories?” [Laughs] Yeah. Yeah, I have other stories! After Free Lunch, I promised myself that was it. But . . . then I wrote Punching Bag. And then I was like, that is it. But then I wrote Abuela, Don’t Forget Me when my abuela got dementia. And then he finally talked me into writing Road Home, and I was like, “That’s it! I’m done! No more memoirs!” And then I signed up with Scholastic to do a trilogy of memoirs for middle school. [Laughs again]

What Followed

Rex: Four Eyes, Pizza Face, and Fruit Cake (which just came out in April) is a graphic novel trilogy. It's 6th grade, 7th grade, 8th grade. Even though they take place at the same time as Free Lunch and Punching Bag, that is not the thesis. I wanted to give kids who are not ready for Free Lunch or Punching Bag a different story. It’s still me. You'll see the same characters. And you’ll see the poverty. Poverty is important for kids to see. In the first book, like, getting glasses? That was a huge deal for me because my family didn't have money for glasses. We basically had to beg my dad, who had left when I was five. That's not a good feeling—to feel like you have to beg for stuff when you’re a kid.

Rex: Then with Pizza Face, all my friends were on Clearasil and acne medication. I didn't have that option. So again, what I like is that I am writing memoirs that address one thing but they're talking about something else that I think is even more relatable. So many people in our country are living below the poverty line.

Julie: Yes, yes. I love that. I feel like even in your memoirs, I know that at first you were like, “I don't want to dip into the painful stuff. I don’t want to go there, or write something real.” But I also think, and I say this when I talk about authors who write for kids and write for teenagers, the books have that resilience and hope. The person who writes the memoir has the survivor story and gets to tell the story. Like, you made it. You're still here with us, and I'm so glad. I think that for your audience you always seem to make sure that you include that resilience and hope. So, in your story of. . . well, some really tough things that you've been through, how do you make sure that you include that?

Rex: I mean it's hard because I feel like with Punching Bag, like that was my Empire Strikes Back. Like, in the trilogy of Free Lunch, Punching Bag, Road Home, that was kind of a sad ending. I wanted there to be hope, but I wanted to be honest with my readers. Like, this is hard when there is violence in the home. It is hard, and it does not go away. There's not a happy ending at the end. But I can write an afterword. So, if the narrative itself is heavy, and doesn't necessarily have a happy ending, I still put the afterword. I survived this, you know. We can all survive whatever the world throws—I mean, see, even that? I want to self-correct, because some people don't survive everything the world throws at them. This world is hard. But I do hope that, you know, with all my books, that there is kind of a through line for readers. There are ways that you can help yourself. There are ways you can lean on resources that are out there. You know, if you have one family member that can help, lean on them. If you have one friend that can help, lean on them. We're all in this together. It's hard. Ugh. Sorry. I know I keep saying that life is hard.

Julie: It is, though. It is. I was thinking about when you said, “I want to self-correct” and how some of us don't survive. I was like, well, in fact, none of us do. Like, not one of us. 200 years from now, you are not going to be here. And, I'm not going to be here. None of us. But how do we make it more tolerable, and sometimes even joyful? When we're here, and it's all of those things you listed—leaning on each other. That's where the resilience and hope is. It is in each other.

Rex: Yeah, yeah.

Pen Name and Other Projects

Julie: Yeah. Okay, now let's talk about your pen name and some of your other books.

Rex: Rey Terciero. Fun fact. . . a lot of my pen names, I have like eight. [both of us laugh] Really, I only count Rex Ogle and Rey Terciero. All the other ones I was doing for work for hire back when I needed extra paychecks. Working in publishing, I made like zero dollars. I mean, making $35,000 in New York City is not a lot of money. So I did all this writing under pseudonyms.I was not supposed to be writing for other publishing houses, because it was considered a conflict of interest. And I'm like, “I gotta pay the bills.” So, I kept making up pen names and Rey Terciero is one of the ones that stuck. I got this idea to start doing classic reimaginings as graphic novels. The first one was Little Women—Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. My co-creator, Bre Indigo is Black and they wanted a Black family. I was like, “Well, I can't write all of that, but how about we create this story together?” So, it's a mixed family, and of course there's a queer character. It’s like a modern day Little Women. This is more realistic to what people are going through. It’s part of what I am doing with Dan in Green Gables, which is Anne of Green Gables, but with the queer character. Northranger which is Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, or coming out next year, Count of Monte Cristo High. I want to reimagine these stories where kids are at. Twenty years of rejection pushed me. It was “Stop writing what you think will make you a New York Times bestseller, and start writing the books that you wanted to read as a kid.” As a kid I wanted to read comic books. I wanted to read graphic novels. Apparently that aligns with what kids want to read today. Maybe if they like Dan in Green Gables, they'll be like, “What's Anne of Green Gables?” In the back of every single one, I make sure that there is room for back matter, meaning an author letter about why I wrote it, then a page about the author, and a page about the original work.

To me that's very important. I want kids to be able to explore, to be like, “Ohh, this has an origin that I had no idea about!”

Julie: I love Dan. Do you have other classics that you're thinking about doing this with? I know you're super busy, and you're writing a ton, but like, do you have kind of a running list of eventual titles? And are we allowed to know?

Rex: I'm pulling up my spreadsheet now for you. I won't tell you everything. What I can tell you: The Odyssey: Long Way Home is an anthropomorphic version of the Greek Odyssey, but in the very first scene Odys, who is a little mouse. Odysseus—Odys—throws down a sword and he promises the gods he will never kill again. He will never do violence against another person again. They're like, “Ohh. Try to get home without using violence.” So, it's him fighting against his own need to hurt other people the entire way home. I actually wrote it in 2019, and the artist is still drawing it. It is beautiful—stunning. I don't know when it's coming out. It may be a minute. Let's see, what else am I working on? I'm working on a four part Jane Austen series that I cannot tell you about, even though I just said it. I have a list of some of my favorite books. I'll just tell you the original names: Romeo and Julie:t, Wuthering Heights, Scarlet Letter, Macbeth. I want to do something with all the monsters: Frankenstein, Dracula . . .

Julie: That would be a really cool series.

Rex: Yeah, I have another idea involving social media. What I love to do is like, Trojan horse some important messaging into books. I'm getting a tattoo of a Trojan horse soon, because I feel like that's what I've done my whole life. I present very white. I present straight. I present, I mean, maybe not wealthy but . . . I feel like my whole life I've been kind of Trojan horsing myself into helping myself. and now I'm trying to Trojan horse myself into helping others.

Julie: That is totally the vibe that I got from you the very first moment that I met you in person.

Rex: That I’m a Trojan horse? [Both laugh]

Julie: No. That you present as someone who is constantly doing the work to be the best, toward-healing human being that you can. And you write so that kids can find healing in stuff too. So yeah, Trojan horse.

Rex: I mean, not to be too serious, but the way I look at it is if it weren't for my abuela, if it weren't for books and stories, if it weren't for educators and librarians and teachers who encouraged me—it certainly wasn't my parents—if it was not for those people, I'd be in prison. I'd be dead in a ditch. I wouldn't be here. So as far as I'm concerned, it is my job to pay it forward. I feel like my abuela, who passed a few years back, is always in my ear being like, “No, you're not going to do that to make money. You're going to write this book over here instead, to help kids.”

When We Ride

Julie: OK, so earlier you were talking about writing in different formats, and I love that you went there with a YA novel. Tell us about that decision, that journey, that whole process.

Rex: So, when I wrote When We Ride, you know, I had sworn off memoirs. I went to my publisher and I was like, “My senior year is a really good story.” He was like, “I thought you said, ‘No more memoirs.’” So, we had a conversation about it. He liked the concept but the ending was all wrong. He's like, “Maybe you should go fiction,” and I was like, “I think you're right.” So, When We Ride is only 70% true. [Laughter] My senior year in high school I was living with my abuela. My best friend was a drug dealer. I used to drive him around to his drug deals because he did not have a car. I would sit in the car, doing my homework and filling out college applications, while he would go into college campuses and sell weed to college students. A lot of people were like, “Don't you know your best friend's a drug dealer?” I'm like, “Yeah.” They thought that made me a bad person by association. I was like, “Why is he a bad person?” They didn't know his life circumstances—why he was doing it. His mom has no job and we lived in Abilene, TX which is a small town, and a college town. There were no jobs. The college students sweep them all up because there's three universities. So, he pays his bills. He has a little brother to take care of. He puts food on the table. He is a 17 year old teenager. What else is he supposed to do? He hasn't failed society. Society has failed him.

Julie: Wow. Yes.

Rex: The point of the book that I want readers to take away, well, two things. One, when you look at someone who you judge, I want you to think about why you are judging them, and maybe what’s their real truth. Two, and maybe more importantly, I also want the kid who's like me to know that you have to have boundaries. I loved him. He was like a brother to me, but I had to draw boundaries. I was like, “I cannot jeopardize my future for your decisions.” His real name was Marshall. He would never have read prose.

And then, Tupac

Julie: Tell me more about Marshall.

Rex: He loved Tupac. When he used to hop into my car, he would pop a Tupac cassette tape into my radio. At first, I’d be like, “No, I don't like this music.” He was always like, “You're racist.” Oh, and by the way, he's white. That's the funniest part. Everyone assumes he's Black because he's a drug dealer. I say several times in the book he is white.

Julie: I picked up on it—blue eyes.

Rex: Yeah. There have been people who've been like, “Why did you decide to write about a black drug dealer?” and I was like, “Did you read the book?’

Julie: Some of their own racism kind of peeked through a little bit.

Rex: Yeah, anyways, he loved Tupac. He made me read Tupac's song lyrics. You know when you fold out the cassette tape? I loved the words. The words were like poetry. When I decided to write When We Ride, I felt like writing a novel-in-verse. It's a good way of meeting kids where they're at.

Julie: So, Tupac, he did write poetry. There's a whole anthology.

Rex: It’s under my desk right now. [Holds the book The Rose That Grew From Concrete up to the camera].

Julie: Look at that! Tupac! Yes, um, I feel like making the story accessible to students who don't identify as a reader yet is exactly what your novel-in-verse does. Did Marshall read it?

Rex: Oh, Marshall passed away right after right after high school.

Julie: Oh, I’m sorry.

Rex: He passed away from leukemia. This is one of the reasons why my publisher said my first ending was not a good ending. The cool thing is that I introduced him to my other best friend—the goody-goody girl that is in the book. She was vice-president of the student council. She was a straight-laced, good girl. They fell in love. They got married. Their daughter is my goddaughter. I did ask Casey and Madison's permission before I wrote When We Ride. I was like, “Is it okay if I put this out in the world? It's your story, too.”

What's Next?

Julie: I’m glad they agreed. Thank you for writing it. I read it in a day, because . . . well, it's so good. So, what’s next? More YA?

Rex: So, I have 21 books under contract. Only about half of them are written [laughs] The next book that I have coming out, that I'm both really proud of, and I have nightmares constantly about the NRA coming for me. It's called American Gun. It is the story told from the perspective of a Glock 19 as it makes its way across America from 1988 to 2028, and all the lives that it affects along the way. So, it changes hands 16 times over the course of 40 years. I grew up in Texas, you know. I was taught gun safety at an early age. This book has been on the back of my mind for a while. Especially with all the school shootings. I'm very excited about this book. It's taken more research than most of my books. The history of guns, I've been reading old articles from the 70s, the 80s, the 90s talking about gun violence in America. What else am I doing in the YA space? The Count of Monte Cristo High. What else do I have that's coming up? Oh my gosh. so much middle grade.

Julie: I know. That’s wonderful, too. We have students in the middle that need your stories.

Rex: Oh. There's one that I started working on a few months ago. I won't tell you the title, but it is about the cross intersection of homophobia, toxic masculinity, sexual assault, and suicide. Those are four very very heavy topics, but I've had this story in the back of my mind for a while. I want to talk about what it means to be a man in America, and by man, I mean a teenage boy. People are putting up these videos that are influencing thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of boys in America with these really negative messages about what it looks like to be a man. I just want to write books that give kids an alternative to that. I mean, obviously, I can't compete with social media, but I will try to put books in their hands that talk about the things that maybe other people aren't talking to them about.

Julie: Love it! So, I'm going to ask one last question that'll be like the end of the article and then I'm going to stop recording and we're just going to talk for a little off the record. You talked about being like a Trojan horse and getting a message to kids. You dip into how life is hard, and you're real. So, there are a lot of different messages overall that you have for our teenage readers. If you could just Trojan horse one last message for our teenagers, what’s the message?

Rex: I want every teenager in the world to know to take care of each other. Take care of each other and take care of yourself.

Who Gets to Be a Person in Hamlet? Companion Texts, Verse Novels, and Writing Our Way to Understanding

7/1/2026

Who Gets to Be a Person in Hamlet? Companion Texts, Verse Novels, and Writing Our Way to Understanding by Melanie Hundley

It is no secret that I love verse novels. As a reader, I am drawn to the way poetry slows me down and invites me to linger in a character's thoughts. As a teacher, I appreciate the opportunities verse novels create for students to notice how writers use language, structure, and silence to create meaning. As a teacher educator, I value the ways these texts help students move beyond summary and into interpretation.

Recently, while reading Hamlet with a group of students, I found myself returning once again to Joy McCullough's Enter the Body. McCullough's collection gives voice to Shakespeare's female characters, allowing them to tell stories that are often overshadowed by the narratives of the men around them. These poems do not retell the plays, rather, the poems enter into conversations with the events, with the characters, with the ideas presented. They invite readers to reconsider characters they thought they knew. They ask the reader to ask, “What if…”

Reconsidering Ophelia

As the students and I moved between Shakespeare's play and McCullough's poems, questions began to emerge: What do we actually know about Ophelia? Who gets to be a person in Hamlet? Is Hamlet a good guy? The discussions around Ophelia, her role, and her personhood were particularly thoughtful. At first the question of whether or not Ophelia is a person seemed simple. Of course she is. She speaks. She appears in multiple scenes. She influences the actions of the play

But the more closely we read, the more complicated the question became. Students could easily identify what other characters say about Ophelia. They could point to Laertes warning her about Hamlet. They could describe Polonius instructing her how to behave. They could analyze Hamlet's contradictory declarations of love and rejection.

Yet when we looked closely at the text, students noticed something important. We know a great deal about what others think of Ophelia. We know far less about what Ophelia thinks of them.
Much of what we learn about Ophelia comes through the words of the men around her. She is advised, directed, protected, criticized, and used. She is important to the plot, but her interiority her private thoughts, fears, hopes, questions, and desires that shape her experience, often remains just beyond our reach. In many ways, Ophelia functions as a daughter, a sister, a love interest, a source of concern, a symbol of innocence, and eventually a symbol of tragedy.

Reading the Poetry

But when does she get to simply be a person? That is one of the gifts of Enter the Body.

McCullough enters the spaces Shakespeare leaves open. She invites readers to dwell in the limited space Ophelia is allowed to occupy and imagine what exists beyond it. Rather than asking what Ophelia represents, the poem asks who Ophelia might be.

To explore the poem, we read it three times. The first reading was as readers.
We asked:

What do we notice?
How do we feel?
What lingers with us after we read?

Students responded emotionally to the poem. They noticed Ophelia's confusion, heartbreak, and uncertainty. They commented on the tension in the dialogue and the impact of the white space on the page. This reading invited students to experience the poem before analyzing it.

The second reading was as scholars.
We asked:

What lines stand out?
What literary elements do we notice?
What can we say based on the evidence?

Students began identifying patterns. They noticed contradictions in Hamlet's statements. They examined repetition, dialogue, and structure. They discussed how the poem shifted attention away from Hamlet's emotional turmoil and toward Ophelia's experience of the interaction. Their observations moved from reaction toward interpretation.

The third reading was as writers.
We asked:

What does this text model?
What does it inspire?
How does it help me make sense of something?

This reading changed everything. Students noticed how McCullough used fragmented dialogue, white space, and layered voices to reveal a character's inner life. They began thinking about what stories exist between the lines of canonical texts. They considered what becomes visible when we enter the perspective of a character whose voice is often overshadowed by others. Most importantly, they began writing. That third reading opened the door to some of the most interesting thinking of the unit.

Student Writing (Erica)

After reading Enter the Body, pp. 100-101, several students chose to write an updated high school version of the scene between Hamlet and Ophelia. What would it look like now? Erica wrote:

In the hallway, between classes

We passed each other and       paused,

I said               I have remembrances of yours
                        things to give back
You said          I never gave you anything
The world of the hallway shrank and grew, fell silent, echoed with your words
                                    *I can’t breathe.*
I said               You know right well you did. Sweet notes, perfume, a poem, your t-shirt.
                        They were the best of gifts
                                                but not now. Now, they mean…nothing.
You asked       Did you lie?
                        What?             *I can’t breathe.*
You asked       Were you faithful?
                        What? *I can’t breathe*
You said          I did love you…once.
                                    *I feel like I am drowning*
I said               You made me believe you did…but now…
You said          You shouldn’t have believed me
                        I didn’t love you.
                                    *I feel like I am drowning*
I thought         You were the liar.
You said          Women lie and cheat and make monsters of men.
                        You paint yourself as sweet and you are just a whore.
                                    *I feel like I am drowning*
I thought         I am not the one who pretended to love, who gave false words and false gifts.
                        Is it his grief? Or is he really just a jerk?
                                    I feel like I am drowning*

Erica’s poem opens, “In the hallway, between classes/We passed each other and paused” and quickly establishes the emotional intensity of a public breakup. We see the speaker’s confusion when the male partner in the breakup denies doing things she knows he did and then her pain when she is accused of things she did not do. Throughout the poem, Erica includes the repeated lines “I can’t breathe” and “I feel like I am drowning.” These refrains function as both an allusion to the play and an interior voice running alongside the spoken dialogue. Much like McCullough’s poem, Erica’s writing invites readers to do more than observe the interaction. She invites them to experience its emotional impact.

At first glance, Erica's poem appears to be a contemporary adaptation of Ophelia's encounter with Hamlet. But as I read it more closely, I realized she was doing something much more sophisticated. She was developing an interpretation. The poem captures a painful interaction between two people, but it also highlights something central to both Shakespeare's scene and McCullough's reimagining: the denial of shared experience. Just as Hamlet denies the letters and affection Ophelia remembers, Erica's speaker encounters someone who refuses to acknowledge a shared history. The poem also foregrounds the gendered accusations present in the original text. By the end of the piece, the speaker is confronted not only with rejection but with blame and dismissal.

Student Reflection (Erica)

What fascinated me most, however, was Erica's reflection on the writing process. After composing the poem, she wrote:

I was really thinking about Ophelia and wanted to write my essay about her and how she was treated by Hamlet, her father and brother. But I struggled to figure out what I wanted to say. I did poem pre-writing and that helped me think about how Ophelia is treated by the men in her life: she is used as a tool by her father, she is discarded as a girlfriend by Hamlet, and she is dismissed by her brother as unimportant. She doesn't matter to them until she is dead and then they think about her as a person. And even then she is more of a symbol than a person. She is never fully real to them.

I keep returning to this reflection because it reveals something important about writing and learning. The poem was not simply evidence of Erica's thinking. The poem helped create her thinking. At first, Erica was thinking about Ophelia's feelings. By the end, she was developing a theory about Ophelia's position within the play. She noticed that Polonius uses Ophelia as a tool.
Hamlet discards her when she no longer serves his needs. Laertes dismisses her concerns and agency. What began as individual moments became a larger pattern. By the time Erica wrote her reflection, she was no longer simply asking whether Ophelia was treated unfairly. She was asking whether Ophelia was ever allowed to exist as a full person in the eyes of the men around her.

Her observation is powerful: Ophelia doesn't matter to them until she is dead. Erica then pushes the idea even further. Even after Ophelia’s death, she is still more of a symbol than a person. This insight takes us back to the question that started our reading. Who gets to be a person in Hamlet? While many students focused on the women in the play, several did ask whether Hamlet was allowed to be a fully formed person or whether he was more of a symbol as well.

Student Writing (Cory)

Cory wrote:

I know.
A crown. A throne. A story.A kingdom.
Everyone knows.
They tell it
over and over.
The murdered king. The usurping brother. The grieving son.
I know my lines.
Then speak them.
You ask as if
they belong to me.
As if I chose them.
As if I woke one morning
wanting blood.
As if grief and vengeance
are the same thing.
I know my lines.
The murdered king. The wicked uncle. The rightful heir.
The son who swears
and remembers
and kills.
I know my lines.
Everyone else does too.
The guards. The court. My mother. Even the audience.
They wait
for me to say them.
To become them.
To mean them.
Then why do you hesitate?
Because you were my father.
Because I cannot remember
the sound of your voice
without hearing
the command beneath it.
Because I miss you.
Because I am angry
that I miss you.
Because I want
one moment
to be a son
before I become
your weapon.
I know my lines.
But I do not know
how to speak them
with your ghost
standing inside my grief.
I know my lines.
I just didn’t write them.

Student Reflection (Cory)

Cory said, “Hamlet seems lost in most of the play. He is trying to figure out what to do when none of it seems to be what he wants to do or what he planned. Everything is coming at him from the outside, everybody’s expectations are piling on him.” Cory’s observation feels like it gets at something essential in the play; he is focusing on the weight of the expectations on Hamlet. Everyone wants something from Hamlet. His father’s ghost wants revenge, Claudius wants obedience, Gertrude wants reconciliation, Ophelia wants honesty, Denmark wants stability, and the audience wants action. Hamlet is constantly responding to demands rather than pursuing his own wants. So when Cory says, “Everything is coming at him from the outside, everybody’s expectations are piling up on him,” he is describing a loss of agency that is surprisingly similar to what Erica noticed about Ophelia.

The difference is that Hamlet receives attention and authority while Ophelia receives marginalization and dismissal. Yet both are trapped by roles assigned to them by others. Ophelia is reduced to daughter, sister, and potential wife. Hamlet is reduced to son, prince, and avenger. Neither is fully allowed to exist outside those roles.

Final Reflection on Using Companion Texts

One of the reasons I continue to use companion texts such as Enter the Body is that they help students notice what literary analysis sometimes overlooks. They encourage students to ask not only what a character represents, but what has been left unsaid about that character's experience.
They invite students to enter the silences of a text. They encourage students to challenge whose stories are centered and whose stories remain at the margins. And, perhaps most importantly, they create opportunities for students to use writing as a way of discovering what they think.

For Erica and Cory, writing the poem was not preparation for literary analysis. the poem was literary analysis. It was through writing that they discovered their arguments. They did turn the poem into a well-developed essays, but the poem served as thinking and analysis for them. Sometimes the most important thing a companion text does is help students notice not what a character represents, but who that character might be. And sometimes the most important thing writing does is help students discover that person, too.

Reflections at the Conclusion of Pride Month

6/24/2026

Meet our Contributor: Roy Jackson

Roy Edward Jackson is an associate professor of education at Goshen College in Indiana with a focus on literacy. He holds degrees in English, Education and School Library Science. He is the author of the upcoming book, Reel Around the Fountain, published by Lethe Press.

Reflections at the Conclusion of Pride Month by Roy Jackson

As Pride Month draws to a close, I wandered across the street in my lovely town to the public library for some inspiration. While browsing the displays — not the stacks — I was struck by my own queer privilege in living in Goshen, Indiana. Goshen is an inclusive community, a city where I feel safe — something I never would have expected when I first moved here for a job, leaving a large city behind. The young adult section had wonderful LGBTQ+ titles on full display for readers to find. It made me think about how different that same library display would look if I traveled just 30 miles in almost any direction. Regardless of book bans or quieter, self-selected censorship, we know visibility is one key to combating the troubling decline in support for LGBTQ+ citizens that Gallup recently reported.

In the summer, I usually gravitate toward fiction as an escape from whatever's stressing me out at the moment. But as I browsed the displays, I was genuinely impressed by the nonfiction collection my local library had curated. It took me back to my teaching days and how rote February could feel, with the same handful of figures showing up in book after book — and how, over the decades, educators worked to broaden that scope and multiply the heroes we offered students for Black History Month. The same is true of the books I pulled off the shelf and got lost in that afternoon: so many names, so many remarkable contributions, so many heroes.

I love June and Pride Month, but as an educator, it saddens me that most students aren't in school when we could be celebrating, honoring, and teaching our queer histories. I hope some of these books find their way into classrooms next academic year.

Queer There and Everywhere: 23 People Who Changed the World by Sarah Prager was one of the books I found myself completely absorbed in. It's exactly the kind of broadened-scope storytelling I was thinking about, the same impulse that pushed Black History Month beyond the same five names every February. Yes, Takei and Lincoln are in there, but so is Elagabalus, the teenage Roman emperor whose gender-defying reign reaches back nearly two thousand years and reminds you that none of this is new, queerness has always existed, only the willingness to name it has changed. There's Ma Rainey, the blues singer whose openness about loving women got buried under her musical legacy for decades. There's Alan Turing, a man whose mathematical genius helped win a war and whose own country later prosecuted him for who he loved.

And then there's Renée Richards, whose chapter felt almost urgent to read given the current moment. Richards, a trans woman and professional tennis player who fought for and won the right to compete in the late 1970s, feels less like history and more like a preview of the exact battles still being fought today, as the lives and rights of trans athletes are once again under attack. Reading her story now hit differently than it might have a decade ago. Prager doesn't limit herself to a narrow definition of queerness; she traces anyone who lived outside the gender and sexuality norms of their time, which means the book reads less like a single thread and more like a tapestry. I kept flipping pages thinking, why didn't I know this person existed? It's conversational, occasionally funny, and built for teens, which made me wish even harder that I had a classroom of students to hand it to.

Flamboyants: The Queer Harlem Renaissance I Wish I'd Known by George M. Johnson was another one I couldn't put down. Johnson, the author of the frequently banned All Boys Aren't Blue, weaves together twelve short biographies interspersed with their own personal narrative and poetry, and the effect is part history lesson, part memoir, part reclamation. It's a structure that lets you sit with the past and the present at the same time.

Johnson opens the door with names most of us already recognize: Langston Hughes, Josephine Baker, Zora Neale Hurston. But then the book does exactly what I keep coming back to in this whole project, it widens the lens. Alain Locke, often called the father of the Harlem Renaissance and the architect of so much of the movement's philosophy, gets his due as a gay man whose influence shaped a generation of Black artists and writers. Gladys Bentley, a blues performer who dressed in men's clothing and openly courted women onstage in 1920s Harlem nightclubs, decades before anyone was using the language we use now, gets brought roaring back into focus. Even Ma Rainey shows up again here, which made me realize how many of these queer histories overlap and echo each other once you start looking.

This book matters for another reason too. Even within our own community, the loudest, most visible voices in queer history have so often been cis, white, and male. Johnson's book is a direct counter to that imbalance, centering Black queer lives, and several trans and gender-nonconforming lives within them, as foundational rather than footnoted. Johnson's point, and it lands, is that the Harlem Renaissance wasn't just adjacent to queerness, it was one of the queerest eras in American cultural history, and most of us were never taught that part, and we definitely weren't taught who was actually in the room shaping it.

The next book on my stack was LGBTQ+ Athletes Claim the Field: Striving for Equality by Kirstin Cronn-Mills, with an introduction by Alex Jackson Nelson, a trans man who works directly with LGBTQ+ youth in sports. And that's exactly the point I keep landing on with this reading session, it doesn't center the same handful of cis, white, male athletes whose coming-out stories tend to dominate the headlines. Cronn-Mills opens with the moment soccer star Abby Wambach kissed her wife on camera after the US women's World Cup win, then widens out from there: Michael Sam, the first openly gay man in the NFL and the first Division I football player to come out while still actively playing, which happened only a little over a decade ago, a fact that still stops me cold every time I read it. There's David Denson too, who came out as gay while playing minor league baseball for the Brewers.

What sets this book apart is that it doesn't stop at athletes. Cronn-Mills looks at coaches, families, and the institutions, the policies, leagues, and locker room cultures, that have been slow to catch up, even as individual courage outpaces them. Reading it now, with the rights of trans athletes specifically back under attack, felt less like a history lesson and more like a mirror held up to where we still are.

My education started in the past was only deepened, and complicated in the best way, by reading the present in Kimm Topping's Generation Queer: Stories of Youth Organizers, Artists, and Educators. The book is organized into six chapters, moving from organizers to artists to educators before closing with a call to action, concrete steps for how young people and the adults who support them can actually get involved. What Topping has done is take the everyday hero theme and place a giant magnifying lens on it, training that focus specifically on a generation I rarely see celebrated this way: queer and trans youth who are building change right now, not someday.

Prior to reading, I didn’t know one name in this book, and that alone says something. Their stories are now etched in my ethos. There's Blair Imani, a Black, bisexual, Muslim educator using her platform to make queer history and identity accessible to people who've never had it explained to them in a way that felt like it included them. There's Alok Vaid-Menon, a gender-nonconforming poet, comedian, and speaker who has turned vulnerability and humor into a genuine tool for changing minds. There are organizers who founded their own advocacy groups while still in high school, students who fought and won the right to safe restroom access for transgender peers, and the first transgender athlete to compete in NCAA Division I sports. Topping threads in brief histories of Marsha P. Johnson, Harvey Milk, and Sylvia Rivera too, so readers can see exactly whose shoulders this new generation is standing on. By the time I closed the book, I wasn't just learning new names, I was watching the same lineage of courage that built Stonewall and the AIDS crisis activism of the 80s continue, unbroken, into kids who are still in school right now.

What strikes me most, looking back at this stack of books, isn't just that I learned new names, it's how many new names there were. Breadth and depth, not just the same handful of figures rotated through every June the way February used to recycle the same five or six names for Black History Month. Lincoln and Takei are still there if you're looking for an entry point, but so are Elagabalus, Ma Rainey, Alan Turing, Renée Richards, Alain Locke, Gladys Bentley, Blair Imani, Alok Vaid-Menon, Michael Sam, David Denson, and so many youth organizers I'd never have found on my own. That's the shift that actually matters. Visibility isn't just about one Pride display in one library window, it's about sheer numbers, about how many lives get to count as part of this history instead of being the single token name a syllabus reaches for. The more names, the harder the erasure becomes to pull off, and the easier it gets for a kid scanning a library shelf in Goshen, or anywhere else, to find someone who looks like them already claiming a place in the story.

But we're already disadvantaging young readers by the simple fact that Pride Month falls in June, when school is out of session and these books are sitting on display instead of in the hands of students. And walking into a public library at all is a privilege, not every kid has reliable transportation, a parent with the time, or even a library branch nearby, for a whole range of reasons that have nothing to do with how much they might need these stories. School libraries and classroom libraries are the equalizer. They're the only guaranteed access point some students will ever have. If visibility and breadth and depth are the goal, then the real question isn't how we celebrate Pride better every summer, it's how we find room for these names, these histories, this many of them, during the school year, on the shelves students walk past every single day, when the students who need to see themselves in these pages are actually in the building to find them.

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YA Verse Novels Keeps Poetry Alive

The YA Verse Novel as a Hybrid

Ellen Hopkins's Crank

Kwame Alexander's The Crossover

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Sharing One Novel in Depth: Exploring Courage, Justice, and Global Awareness Through The Hidden Girl

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From Reading to Action

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“At the Table with British Literature, American Literature, Post-Colonial Literature:” A Conversation with Victor Malo-Juvera and Crag Hill on The Oxford Handbook of Young Adult Literature

The Origin Story

The Proposal Process

Recuriting and Working with Chapter Authors

Working Together

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More about Working with and Recuriting Authors

Challenges and Surprizes

What does the Handbook Mean for the Status of the Field

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Podcasts and Young Adult Literature by Rebekah Buchanan

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Some Favorites from Established Authors

Citations

Meet our Contributor: Margaret A. Robbins, PhD

Teaching the Hero’s Journey with YA and Middle Grades Literature ​by Dr. Margaret A. Robbins, PhD

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Chains

Complexities of The Hero's Journey

References

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Robert Cormeir

Dissertations and the Pursuit of Truth

Recent Dissertations about Young Adult Literature

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Has the Funny Dwindled?

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Areas for Further Study and Concluding Thoughts

References

Book References

Appendix​YA Books with Heavy Themes and Humor that I’ve Read (Published in the Last 15 Years):

AppendixFunny YA Books I’ve Read (Published in the Last 15 Years):

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Meet Rex Ogle:

Trojan Horses and Real Talk with Rex OgleAn interview by Julie Hoffman with Rex Ogle

What Followed

Pen Name and Other Projects

When We Ride

And then, Tupac

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​Who Gets to Be a Person in Hamlet? Companion Texts, Verse Novels, and Writing Our Way to Understanding by Melanie Hundley

Reconsidering Ophelia

Reading the Poetry

Student Writing (Erica)

Student Reflection (Erica)

Student Writing (Cory)

Student Reflection (Cory)

Final Reflection on Using Companion Texts

Meet our Contributor: Roy Jackson

Reflections at the Conclusion of Pride Month by Roy Jackson

Dr. Steve Bickmore​Creator and Curator

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YA Verse Novels: Marching to Their Own Beat by Dr. Melanie Hundley

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Resource for difficult conversations:

Teaching the Hero’s Journey with YA and Middle Grades Literature
by Dr. Margaret A. Robbins, PhD

Appendix
YA Books with Heavy Themes and Humor that I’ve Read (Published in the Last 15 Years):

Appendix
Funny YA Books I’ve Read (Published in the Last 15 Years):

Trojan Horses and Real Talk with Rex Ogle
An interview by Julie Hoffman with Rex Ogle

Who Gets to Be a Person in Hamlet? Companion Texts, Verse Novels, and Writing Our Way to Understanding by Melanie Hundley

Dr. Steve Bickmore
Creator and Curator

Bickmore's
Co-Edited Books