Blog Posts

Historical Fiction as Inspiration

11/26/2025

Check out the 2026 Summit on

The Research and Teaching of Young Adult Literature

The 2026 Summit on the Research and Teaching of Young Adult Literature
Online
Thursday evening, February 26 & Friday, February 27, 2026
https://www.yalsummit.org/

Call for Proposals
Proposals Due by December 5, 2025
Proposal Form: https://forms.gle/NjeWp1kCubyFuF1R8

Meet our Contributor:

Meet our Contributor: Dr. Rebecca Chatham-Vazquez is an assistant professor and the director of English Education at North Dakota State University, where she is living her dream, teaching Methods courses and Young Adult Literature and mentoring preservice English teachers. She is in her 16th year of teaching and loves it just as much now as she did on day one. She has taught and worked with pre- and in-service teachers in Montana (very rural), Arkansas (urban), Arizona (urban and rural), and, now, North Dakota (urban and rural). She has been a member of NCTE since 2008, and is a strong supporter of professional organizations like NCTE, its state affiliates, and ALAN. Her research interests include teacher education, rural teacher support, YAL, and methods of teaching reading. She can be reached at [email protected].

Historical Fiction as Inspiration by Rebecca Chatham-Vazquez

Historical fiction as a genre has always been my favorite. Whether it was reading the Dear America diaries in middle school or the Philippa Gregory stories of the Tudors, I have always been in love with history and historical characters and using historical fiction to dive deeper into the reality of what really happened. I have loved using novels when I taught history. I love incorporating history when I teach novels, and I think that history and literature go together in a way that helps us much more deeply understand the past and how that past plays a role in our daily lives.

When I was planning my semester of Young Adult Literature, one of the things that I kept in mind was the feedback that I had received from previous students of the course, and one of the things they had said was they wanted more representation of LGBTQIA+ voices, so that was something I really focused on in recreating the syllabus for this year and in thinking of my choice book offerings. In addition, one of the other things I thought about was parts of history that I want students to be able to connect to that are much less known. One example of a text that I have used in each iteration of my YAL course is Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline. This is a novel about a very little-known time in American history when orphans, young people from the East Coast, particularly New York City, were put on trains and shipped to the rest of the country, generally the Midwest, so that they would live “good Christian lives” and grow up to be contributing members of society. Orphan Train follows the story of Niamh as she goes through various iterations of lives, and I say “iterations” very purposefully because she is a different person each time she changes homes. Niamh’s story parallels the story of a young girl named Molly, who is experiencing foster care in the modern world. Students often have no idea about this era of American history, and it spurs conversations about how America thinks of children, the ideas of childhood and orphanhood, the foster care system, adoption, and so much more. Thus, it is truly worthwhile to incorporate this text, and, when I thought about the ways that Orphan Train opened our minds to that era of American history, I thought about my choice books.

Every semester, we read four books as a whole class, and then we do two rounds of choice books. In each round, I have a theme. Last year, I chose novels in verse, and then let my ideas go from there. For the other round, the theme was young adult novels that represent various mental health issues. I used Kia Jane Richmond’s Mental Illness in Young Adult Literature: Exploring Real Struggles through Fictional Characters as a way to deepen students’ reading of their novels. This year, I kept the mental health focus for choice book one, but I changed choice book two’s theme to historical fiction, and I chose these five books:

Out of the Dust, by Karen Hesse (female main character, 1930s, Oklahoma),
Last Night at the Telegraph Club, by Melinda Lo (female main character who is a lesbian, 1950s, San Francisco),
Code Talker: A Novel about the Navajo Marines of World War Two, by Joseph Bruchac (male main character, 1940s, overseas),
Ashes of Roses, by Mary Jane Auch (female main character, early 1900s, New York City), and
Ground Zero, by Alan Gratz (male and female main characters, 2001 and 2019, New York City and Afghanistan).

In these choices, I worked to vary time periods and voices as you can see in the parentheses above.

When I introduced the books, I told students that I purposefully chose these novels because they introduce us to forgotten or lesser-known parts of American history. As I was planning the course, I wanted students to think more deeply about sacrifices of people in the past that give us the things that we have now. For example, when I was thinking of Ashes of Roses and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, I wanted students to think about the plight of workers and the things that union organizers, and also just average people, have done to bring rights to workers in this country, and how it's important to fight for those rights even today. Workers, including our students – most of whom are working full time jobs alongside being full time students – deserve to be treated like human beings. And they deserve to know that there are people out there fighting for that.

As a former history teacher, I know that eras like the Gilded Age and the Great Depression can be glossed over in favor of what some might term more interesting history, such as World Wars I and II. I am certain I was guilty of doing this myself when I taught history because, at the same time, I was also teaching the same students in my ELA courses. So, if I glossed over the Gilded Age in junior history class, I could cover it in Junior English when we read The Great Gatsby, and I did. I was lucky to have two class periods with the same students to work with both the literature and history of different time periods. But not every history or English teacher is as lucky as I was to have that kind of time with the material.

Now, in today's world, I really want students to take a deep dive into the Gilded Age; I want students to take a deep dive into the Great Depression and begin to think about the political, social, and economic reasons behind those two eras. I want them to think about how those eras are interconnected and to spark their interest in the people who came before them. Novels like Ashes of Roses and Out of the Dust bring students into the lives of regular people who lived and worked in big cities in early America and rural areas in the 1930s.

For me, my grandparents lived through the Great Depression. My grandfather was a World War II veteran and a prisoner of war, but my students’ grandparents weren't; they're too young for that. According to Diana Paolitto, a Harvard psychologist, teenagers have a difficult time perceiving a “past unless they knew someone who had lived at that time,” so we may be able to assume that students in their teens and early 20s can conceive of a past as far back as the 1950s (Nilsen et al., 261). My students were born after 9/11, so my goal was to bring them into the spaces of people for whom, unlike me, they may have no reference.

One of the reasons I chose Ground Zero by Alan Gratz is that, for my students, their whole lives we've been at war, and it's become ubiquitous, and, thus, at the same time, quite forgettable. I was 15 when 9/11 happened, my school experienced a bomb threat the day afterwards, half the guys I graduated with, and the girls, too, joined the National Guard, or one of the various other branches of service. We were in a military town with an air force base just up the road, and it was very real for us, and it continues to be, as I watch my friends struggle with PTSD and things of that nature that stem from their deployments. The Middle East and the conflicts there were so present for people in my generation. For students now, though, this is something they have lived with their whole lives, and it has almost become background noise. A novel like Ground Zero turns up the volume and makes the actual people affected by these events present in the students’ lives.

I want students to connect with the people in these instances, and that is something that historical fiction does really well as a genre.

Historical fiction must be historically accurate and “steeped in time and place” (Nilson et al., 258). This genre can include mystery, suspense, romance, adventure, and more as long as it maintains historical accuracy. These novels provide readers with “a sense of history’s continuity” and the idea that each era of history is deeply connected to those that came before and those that come after (258). Historical Fiction generally presents readers with a nuanced view of the time and place the characters are in. Sometimes it might be easy to clearly define “good guys” and “bad guys” in these novels, but, often, these authors work to show the moral gray areas that people in past times experienced, just as we do now.

But its deeper purpose is to connect us with those in the past, to be able to put ourselves in situations and say, “Would I have done that? Would I have hidden someone? Would I have undermined an evil king? Would I have fought for workers’ rights? Would I have done any number of things?” Young people (and adults, too!) use novels to practice choices, and doing that in the novel is much safer than doing it in real life. Historical Fiction provides us with the opportunity to say, “If I had been there, what would I have done?” And I think that encourages us at the same time to say, “What should I be doing today, in this historical moment? What choices should I be making that will be remembered by people who come after me?”

Not just students, but teachers, too, are going about their daily lives because we're busy and we have things to do and families to raise, but we forget that just one person can have a huge effect on the world around them. The novel Orphan Train illustrates this truth completely, as do the other novels mentioned in this piece. A kindness from a coworker, some food from a stranger, a teacher who listens to and believes Niamh. Every single person has a role to play.

What made me think this deeply about this topic was reading Number the Stars by Lois Lowry this year. I know I read it at least 10 times when I was growing up, but I decided to reread it this year to prepare for a training provided by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum titled “Exploring Holocaust Literature in the Classroom.” Number the Stars is a short but powerful novel written for elementary to middle grade readers. It details the story of Annemarie, a young Danish girl who must become brave in the face of danger in order to save her best friend. In the background, we see how the entire country of Denmark came together to resist oppression in myriad ways. Lois Lowry has a way of bringing us in and helping us live the lives of the people that she is presenting. One of the key things for me as I reread this novel was Annemarie doesn't know. She only knows that something bigger than her is out there. She knows that her best friend needs her, and that maybe her parents are doing something bigger than themselves, and all she can do is help, fight through the fear, and do her absolute best.

And that absolutely struck me in 2025, because, each day, as we make our regular day-to-day choices and live our regular day-to-day lives, we also can make, perhaps, bigger choices. We can give in to despair; we give in to any number of things on a bad day, but we also can make the choice to do our best and to fight through the fear and to acknowledge that there are bigger things than us happening around us that we can be part of, even with the smallest of actions. We don't have to be the ones running the Danish Resistance, but we could be the person who provides a meal for one of them. We don't have to be the fisherman who's taking Jewish people from Denmark to Sweden, but we could be the person who runs the handkerchief. It is so important for us to remember that in these times and to be inspired.

When I was a young person, these Historical Fiction books helped me develop a sense of justice, a sense of being, a sense of identity. I constantly was thinking, “Who would I have been in those times? Who do I want to be in these times?” Rereading Number the Stars felt like such a key moment in my year, because it's a book that I have thought about many times in the past 30 years, but the actual physical act of rereading it reminded me of the ideals that I had as an eight or nine year old when I read it the first time, reminded me of the deep sense of justice that has guided me into being the type of person that I want to be.

That deep sense of justice, that feeling that, as Byron Graves says, “When you're a teen, everything is everything,” i.e. every small thing means the world, is important to remember because, sometimes, as an adult, everything is everything. Any small thing that we do could be everything to somebody else. We are so deeply interconnected, and the people who come after us are counting on us to remember that.

Number the Stars helped remind me of my place in this world and the type of person that I wanted to be, the type of person that I am, the type of person that I hope to be as I move forward, and Historical Fiction as a genre is inspiring in that way. So as we move into the holiday season and the time of year when we wish that there were peace on earth, when we think deeply about the ways we put others before ourselves, let's remember our sense of justice, the type of people that we wanted to be when we were reading books like Number the Stars growing up, and the type of people that we can still be now. And let’s remember that helping our neighbors doesn't take that much work. Annemarie performed a seemingly small act – carrying the handkerchief – but her work made all the difference.

Works Cited:
Auch, Mary Jane. Ashes of Roses. Henry Holt and Company, 2002, New York City.

Baker Kline, Christina. Orphan Train. William Morrow, 2013, New York City.

Bruchac, Joseph. Code Talker: A Novel about the Navajo Marines of World War Two. SPEAK, 2005, New York City.

Gratz, Alan. Ground Zero. Scholastic, Inc., 2021, New York City.

Hesse, Karen. Out of the Dust. Scholastic, Inc., 1997, New York City.

Lo, Melinda. Last Night at the Telegraph Club. Dutton Books, 2021, New York City.

Lowry, Lois. Number the Stars. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1989, New York City.

Nilsen, Alleen Pace, et al. Literature for Today’s Young Adults. 9th ed., Pearson, 2014, Boston.

Richmond, Kia Jane. Mental Illness in Young Adult Literature: Exploring Real Struggles through Fictional Characters. ABC – CLIO, LLC., 2019, Santa Barbara, CA.

Note** The Dear America diaries, which includes more than 40 books, were published by Scholastic, Inc. https://www.scholastic.com/teachdearamerica/published_allBooks.htm

What Preservice Teachings are Recommending

11/19/2025

First, check out the 2026 Summit on the Research and Teaching of Young Adult Literature

Meet the Contributor: Liz Pilon

Liz Pilon serves as the Instructor of English Education for her alma mater, Concordia College in Moorhead, MN. Housed in the English department, she teaches Communication Arts and Literature Methods, Young Adult Literature, and Reading and Writing Methods for Secondary Education among other English courses. One of her favorite parts of her job is having the opportunity to visit her preservice teachers during their clinical hours and watch them teach secondary students in local schools. Her research interests include YAL, trauma-informed instruction, and best practices in assessment. She is a member of NCTE, ELATE, and ALAN.

What English Education Students are Recommending by Liz Pilon

Meet Marisa: Marisa Ratliff is a college student studying Elementary Education at Concordia College in Moorhead, MN. She is passionate about using children's and young adult literature to promote empathy, cultural understanding, critical thinking, and social-emotional learning. Marissa believes that stories like A Wish in the Dark can inspire students to stand up for fairness and what they think is right vs. wrong, and to engage them in new genres of text.

A Wish In The Dark by Christina Soontornvat

Christina Soontornvat's A Wish in the Dark takes readers to a Thai-inspired island where the Governor controls all light. This story starts with the main protagonist, Pong, a boy born in prison who dreams of escaping and finding freedom, and Nok, the other protagonist, the warden's daughter at the same prison, who is set to capture Pong after his escape. As their journeys intertwine, both characters begin to question what justice really means. Throughout the reading, the book's detailed fantasy world-building with visual writing and storytelling explores themes of fairness, empathy, and moral courage, and reminds readers to be true to themselves.

As a college student studying elementary education, I was immediately drawn to how this story connects to fundamental classroom themes like social justice, empathy, and personal growth. The colorful, eye-catching cover also made me seek it out. A Wish in the Dark would be a meaningful read for upper elementary and middle-grade (grades 4-7).

The story encourages readers to question what fairness is, to think critically about the authority of power and privilege, and to reflect on the compassion between the characters that creates change. Pong's struggle to find acceptance in society and Nok's process of unlearning bias open the door for deep, whole-class discussions. Students can easily connect with these characters because their own conflicts, such as wanting to belong, making mistakes, learning what's right, and unlearning stereotypes and bias, are universal.

One teaching idea is a “Rules vs. Justice” discussion. To start, ask students, "Can a rule be unfair?" Have the students share examples from school or society and write them on the board. Then connect those examples to how the Governor uses his power in A Wish in the Dark. This activity can help students use critical thinking skills to discuss fairness and authority in a collaborative setting.

Reading A Wish in the Dark reminds me why young adult literature is a powerful teaching tool. This story blends adventure, emotion, and a moral lesson throughout, helping students grow into critical thinkers. Soontornvat's story shows that understanding others through key themes presented throughout the story highlights the understanding of those who are different from us.

Meet Murphy: Murphy Carey is a preservice teacher from Edmond, Oklahoma studying at Concordia College-Moorhead. His classroom goal is to create a space where students feel safe enough to learn, no matter who they are or where they come from. He keeps aquariums, knits, and writes poetry in his spare time.

El Deafo by Cece Bell

When ELA teachers pick literature for 5-8th grade classrooms, we need to consider the rapid change they are experiencing. We also need to remember how isolating middle school often felt, especially for those of us who grew up different. I remember feeling stuck in my own head. I felt powerless and self-conscious and weird. That is why I (will) purposefully pick literature for my middle school students that focuses on difference and self-assurance. One of my favorites, for many reasons, is Cece Bell’s El Deafo.

After recovering from childhood meningitis, Cece Bell discovers that she cannot hear. The doctors give her a big, clunky hearing aid to wear strapped to her chest: the Phonic Ear. At school, she gives her teachers a microphone (connected to her Phonic device) which broadcasts their voices directly into her ear. People treat her differently than the rest of her peers when they notice she’s wearing it. To cope with how isolated she feels, Cece creates a persona for herself: the superhero El Deafo! Something that makes her feel different and isolated ends up becoming one of her greatest strengths. This book is a graphic novel, an “equalizing” medium. It often goes beyond lexile; graphic novels do not have to forego complex themes to incorporate understandable language.

It would be topical, fun, and interactive for students to create a superhero based on themselves and their “powers.” I hesitate to tell students to create a superhero with powers based on their differences– that could lead to uncomfortable, exposed feelings about particular insecurities. Keeping the assignment broad will alleviate that burden. I suspect, however, that when this assignment is paired with El Deafo, students will naturally pick one of their differences to highlight in their hero. Then, students will create a 5-panel comic strip with a plot that demonstrates how their superpower could be used for good. This assignment relies on their ability to pick up contextual clues from both the words and the pictures in a graphic novel as well as their knowledge of character traits, plot structure, and dialogue.

Meet Emily: Emily Lubenow is a preservice English teacher at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota. She is passionate about helping students find their voice in their writing and connect to texts that help them understand themselves and their world. Emily hopes to teach middle school English when she graduates, and eagerly anticipates being a highly active member in the artistic spaces at her school, especially relating to music, dance, and performance. When she isn’t reading, Emily finds her sweetest moments in simple joys: good chocolate and time well spent with those she loves.

49 Days by Agnes Lee

In Buddhist tradition, a person must travel for forty-nine days after they die, before they can fully cross over. In Agnes Lee’s graphic novel 49 Days, readers travel with one Korean American girl, Kit, on her journey through her forty-nine days, while also spending time with her family and friends left behind. The novel includes the perspectives of Kit as she traverses through the afterlife, following a map leading her to an indeterminate final destination, Kit’s loved ones in the present, struggling to live in a world where she is gone, and their shared memories of past together, ranging from distant childhood memories to recent, all giving context to the relationships Kit had while living and the ways her family’s lives changed.

Students navigating questions of grief, remembrance, acceptance, or cultural belonging will find Kit’s journey meaningful. Because the novel uses sparse text and relies heavily on imagery to convey emotion, it can also engage visual learners and students developing confidence in literary analysis. Its accessible graphic format invites reluctant readers while still offering sophisticated thematic material for advanced students.

One learning activity a teacher may employ with this novel is research stations that build contextual awareness of the text, which can be especially useful if done prior to or during the process of reading the novel. Around the classroom, the teacher sets up three to four stations focusing on key topics: Buddhist beliefs about the afterlife, Korean mourning rituals, Korean American identity, and visual symbolism in storytelling. Each station includes short readings, photographs, brief videos, or infographics. Students rotate in small groups, spending 8–10 minutes per station while completing a “What? / So What? / How Might This Connect?” organizer. This structure encourages inquiry-based learning, requiring students to summarize information, interpret its significance, and anticipate how it may relate to the novel’s themes.

Meet Malik: Malik Smith is a preservice English teacher at Concordia College in Moorhead, MN. He is passionate about bringing diverse young adult literature into the classroom so that all of his future students can see themselves reflected in the books they read. After graduation, he hopes to teach high school English. When he isn’t reading, Malik enjoys spending time with friends and making the most of every moment.

Promise Boys by Nick Brooks

Promise Boys follows three students J.B., Trey, and Ramón at Urban Promise Prep, a strict school in Washington, D.C. When their principal is found dead, the trio quickly becomes the focus of suspicion. Each has a reason to be angry with him, but none want to be wrongfully accused of murder. Told through multiple perspectives including students, teachers, and social media posts, the novel reads like a fast-paced true-crime story. As readers follow the investigation, they are challenged to ask: if these students didn’t commit the crime, then who did? With suspense, relatable characters, and pressing social questions, this mystery pulls readers in from the first page.

This book is written from multiple points of view, short chapters, and interspersed “documents” like interviews or social media posts encourage students to analyze how bias shapes storytelling. Students can examine how each character’s perspective is interpreted differently and consider how societal and institutional structures affect the treatment of young people. These discussions support diverse learners by validating varied perspectives, promoting critical thinking, and encouraging empathy.

Additionally, Promise Boys connects to foundational ideas in the mystery genre, such as presenting a puzzle, inserting red herrings, and placing ordinary characters in extraordinary circumstances. Using these elements, students can explore literary devices, narrative structure, and suspense techniques while reflecting on social issues that are highly relevant today.

There are a lot of great ideas for teaching this book in a whole-class setting. Here are a few:
● Suspect Chart: Students track clues, motives, and alibis as they read. This visual organizer helps students see connections and evaluate evidence.
● Character Perspective Journals: Assign each small group one character (J.B., Ramón, or Trey) and ask them to journal how bias influences how others perceive their character. This activity encourages empathy and deeper understanding of perspective.
● Mock Trial: Students assume the roles of lawyers, witnesses, and jurors to argue the Promise Boys’ case. They must consider how bias and societal assumptions affect the investigation and verdict.

These activities not only reinforce reading comprehension and literary analysis but also connect the text to real-world issues, prompting students to think critically about justice, bias, and representation.

D[r]ive into Rez Ball: An Interview with Award-Winning Author Byron Graves

11/12/2025

Don't forget to check out the Summit

Meet out Contributor: Dr. Rebecca Chatham-Vazquez is an assistant professor and the director of English Education at North Dakota State University, where she is living her dream, teaching Methods courses and Young Adult Literature and mentoring preservice English teachers. She is in her 16th year of teaching and loves it just as much now as she did on day one. She has taught and worked with pre- and in-service teachers in Montana (very rural), Arkansas (urban), Arizona (urban and rural), and, now, North Dakota (urban and rural). She has been a member of NCTE since 2008, and is a strong supporter of professional organizations like NCTE, its state affiliates, and ALAN. Her research interests include teacher education, rural teacher support, YAL, and methods of teaching reading. She can be reached at [email protected].

D[r]ive into Rez Ball: An Interview with Award-Winning Author Byron Graves by Rebecca Chatham-Vazquez

Byron Graves, Ojibwe and Lakota, is from the Red Lake Nation in the state known as Minnesota. They played basketball there and have even been teaching themselves to skateboard for their latest book project.

Byron has contributed to two anthologies: one multicultural anthology, All Signs Point to Yes, and the other an Indigenous anthology, Legendary Frybread Drive-In, published this year. Their debut novel, Rez Ball, released in 2023, has won several awards, including YALSA’s William C. Morris Award for the best debut novel for young adults and the American Indian Youth Literature Award from the American Indian Library Association. In addition, Rez Ball was a finalist for the Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award.

Of Rez Ball, the Morris Award chair said, “Rez Ball impressed us with its authentic voice, well-developed characters and exciting action scenes as it explored grief, prejudice, friendships, family and community.” I can attest to this statement, as I personally could not put this book down and am still so in love with the characters and with the writing. If you haven’t had the chance to dive into Byron’s writing yet, you have such a treat in store for you.

On October 24, 2025, the North Dakota Council of Teachers of English was privileged to welcome Byron Graves as the keynote speaker at our annual conference. They opened the day by telling us how they found their voice through writing. Byron shared that their time playing basketball provided them with the model of hard work that they needed in order to push through the tough writing times, but it also showed them that they needed to find the fun in writing just as they had in basketball. In between Byron’s opening keynote and after-lunch writing workshop, I was lucky enough to be able to interview them. In this interview, Byron and I dove into topics, such as the role community plays in our lives, the importance of personal expression, how Byron poignantly captures loss and healing in Tre’s story, and so much more. I hope you enjoy listening to and learning from Byron as much as I did!

Interview with Bryon Graves, the Author of the Award-Winning Novel, Rez Ball

**Note: for reading fluidity, I have not included the indications of active listening (yeahs, mmhmms, for sures) during both my longer questions and Byron’s longer answers.

Rebecca: So, Byron, thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. I really appreciate it.

Byron: Yeah, my pleasure.

Rebecca: I'm going to share it on Dr. Bickmore’s YA Wednesday blog in November

Byron: Okay, cool.

Rebecca: and I'm going to share Rez Ball on there as well.

Byron: Woohoo! Thank you.

Rebecca: Yeah! So for the uninitiated, can you describe what rez ball is and how it differs from basketball maybe people think of in their heads from their Friday night basketball games in school or what we might see on TV?

Byron: Yeah, I think it's a combination of street ball. I think it's a combination of like freestyle hip hop. I think it's a combination of kids who are coming from a place where anything and everything can happen at any moment, and there's that uncertainty, and you're constantly in a state of reaction. And basketball, and rez ball specifically, is that opportunity to be the one creating that beautiful madness. And so instead of having a set play where, once you watch a team a few times – other teams – you can say, ‘Hey, look, when they call this play, this guy runs over here, they stop, and then that guy runs over here,’ and you can start to see the pattern and the rhythm, where rez ball is completely uncertain. It's constantly being created, so nobody can just say, ‘Hey, I know what they're going to do,’ because you literally don't know what's coming. But I think that's part of necessity, and it's part of Indigenous survival is constantly figuring out how can we overcome this difference? Like when I was writing Rez Ball, I knew a huge part of that story that I wanted to tell, at least, that, I hope that I told correctly, was that, what's the difference between a Native American teenage athlete and then, say, a teenager in like, an affluent suburb, and what's their life like? What are their challenges like, and how do they differ? And I think when you're looking at a rez ball high school team, a lot of times you're going to have a lot of kids who are, like, 5’10”, and they might be going up against the city team with a bunch of guys who are 6’3”, 6’5”, 6’7”, so it's being able to adapt and be creative with like, ‘Okay, here's the challenge we're facing. But what can we do about that challenge?’

Rebecca: Mmm, yes. Yeah, I really like that because, in the book, I think the spirit of rez ball really comes through, especially when they're playing the other team and they decide to just go for it, and he calls out ‘Superboy,’ and they decide they're just gonna play rez ball. And there's actually joy to it because they're not playing within another set of rules. I really loved that.

So in your keynote, you talked about how, or I thought, you really demonstrated how any subject or activity can be intellectualized. The way that you talked about how you came to love and play and understand basketball, watching the tape and all that, which I think really contradicts with what people often think about young men who play sports or who play video games, right, is that it's completely non-intellectual pursuit, which is not at all true. And I think in the book, you really work against a lot of stereotypes, not just against Native Americans in general, but against young boys, male friendship, all those things. Were you thinking about that as you were writing? Were you thinking about how Tre and Nate and Wes would push back on these stereotypes as you were going through? Can you talk about your thought process?

Byron: It definitely was something that I came up with in later drafts and later versions. As you revisit that story, you're revisiting it (1) from, like, a storytelling perspective, of like, what's going to be interesting, what's going to be page turning, what's going to be entertaining, right? But then you're also asking yourself, ‘How is this going to be interpreted? What kind of impact can this make? How could say a teenage boy read this and be influenced by it?’ And so part of me was sharing my childhood friendship stories from my teenage time, but then part of me was also sharing my adult epiphanies and realizations of how you can break those gender norms or those gender stereotypes, and you can show young men a side of being just a human being and how you can interact with other guys, and that it doesn't always have to be macho or misogynistic or tough guy, and that it's okay to be open and vulnerable and kind and patient with your friends: guys, girls, whoever, non-binary people. That you just can share those adult realizations and stories with a younger reading audience but still make it completely organic and not feel forced, which is another challenge when you're trying to write something. When you're watching a movie and you're like, ‘Oh, that was the info dump’ or ‘Oh, that was them telling me the plot of the story’ – How can I do that in a way that comes across like normal dialogue? So it's a challenge, but it also pays off if you can execute it correctly.

Rebecca: Mmhmm. I definitely think that through loss, so like when my brother was in high school, they had a friend who passed away in a really tragic farming accident. And I think that in those moments, young men seemed to feel okay showing their grief, right? And they did bond as a team, and they still, you know, talk about that and are able to share that, but it seems like then it gets restricted. I had students who lost family members, and it was like, you're allowed to be sad about that, but now we're also not going to talk about the anger that you feel. We're not going to talk about the loneliness or the isolation or, like, how Tre sometimes thinks ‘Can't they just love me for me? Does it always have to be about Jaxon?’ and I felt that in my students, right? That ‘Oh, I'm allowed to be sad, but these other sets of emotions that come out…’ And I think your book really shows how they can actually deal with those emotions and be real people, right?
So that was really so cool.

You write these characters really lovingly; like I really felt that you loved them as I was reading. I wondered, after reading some of your other interviews, too, and how you talked about your relationship with your dad, if writing Tre in particular, in this way, was also a way of loving yourself at that time in your life?

Byron: It was very therapeutic as I went through each iteration of Rez Ball and each rewrite or addition, or, you know, revision, going into a deeper exploration of those dynamics of the family members, the friendships, the dynamics between anybody and everybody, and all the situations and emotions that Tre is going through. With each layer of that that I peeled back, I got deeper and deeper into the psychology behind a lot of it and had my own epiphanies and realizations of those dynamics with say, for example, specifically, like my own father and things that I didn't even know were challenges or obstacles that he and I had in deepening our relationship, or better understanding each other. And so telling this story was, in some way, me understanding what that was like having a father like I had who was very macho and sports-loving and Mr. Tough Guy, Mr. Never Cries, Mr. all of those things and how that can impact a teenager who wants to be themselves and is trying to find themselves and is trying to blossom into their own personality and their own understanding of the world, while also appeasing, you know, their father, mother, siblings, friends, whoever that is. So it definitely was deeper than I thought it was going to be, as far as how it would impact me. I had a lot of nights where I would be writing a specific scene and I would actually have a deeply emotional reaction to it. So in some ways, it was incredibly challenging, because I had to keep experiencing these emotions. But then, on the flip side of that same coin, it was therapeutic, because I was getting stuff out of me that I didn't even know was in there.

Rebecca: Yeah, definitely.
I know you've talked about how on the reservation, loss of friends or siblings or community members, especially in your high school years, can be really common. I think we experienced that in Montana as well. I think rural areas, especially with driving accidents, right? And it did make me wonder how you were able to write so poignantly about specifically the loss of a sibling, especially in your keynote this morning after hearing you say, ‘Oh, first it was a teammate, then it was a cousin, then it was a brother,’ and then the healing aspect of it, too, that really comes in bits and pieces, especially between Tre and his dad, like the scene with Jaxon’s shoes or the Sunday morning basketball court scene. How were you able to capture that?

Byron: I think it was revisiting my experience with losing my dad or my nephew or friends and going through the different moments, whether that's that initial loss, whether it's that grief and anger, whether it's later, when you're looking back and you're thinking nostalgically about this beautiful moment you had or something kind they did for you, and what that healing process can look like. But then I also was examining – because my sister was playing high school basketball, and she was the star point guard of our team when we lost our dad, and so I had to watch her still go to school a couple days later after the funeral, and then still play basketball, because it was mid-season, and the strength and the courage that I saw with her. And my niece, she lost her brother, my nephew, to cancer while she was in the middle of her basketball season her junior year, and she dedicated the rest of her high school basketball career to him, and she wore his number, and she was our first athlete to go play Division I basketball. And so watching the strength of those two young ladies also very directly informed that experience of that character, and what that would look like and sound like and feel like, and how it would not just be linear, but it would be kind of this back and forth, up and down, evolution of that experience.

Rebecca: I love that you used women as your example, because I think Tre comes across as, as a young man, as himself, but like you were saying, you can do kind of, not necessarily gender-bending, but like break gender expectations, especially because it was young girls who you used as an example. That's so cool.

So did your relationship with your dad, and your mom, too, really affect how you wrote about Tre and his parents?

Byron: Yeah, 100%. In the earlier drafts of Rez Ball, there was way more of my personal story of the backlash that I faced from my parents for, you know, painting my fingernails, coloring my hair, wearing clothes that weren't just typically ‘male.’ When I was trying to really find myself and express myself, they had a lot of issues with it. And my frustration with it was that I was a straight A student. I was kind to all my teachers. My teachers loved me. My classmates were kind to me and loved me, and I was a star athlete, and I was staying out of trouble. And where I'm from, if you're not drinking, if you're not on drugs, if you're not truant, you know, I felt like this, you know, anomaly of a student at that time in that place, and all I wanted to do was paint my fingernails and color my hair. And that was a problem. It was an extreme problem for my parents, and we had some of the worst fights we've ever had because of those things. So in my earlier drafts, I really dug into that and visited that a lot more and sat with that a lot more, and then later it just didn't make as much sense for that story or that character, so I pulled some of those things out. But I think anytime you have something that's that big or deep in a story, and you pull it out, the echoes of it still exist. So I think that permeated around the story, and you can still see it and hear it and feel it. You just don't know exactly what it is, but you know there's that difference, or this delta, between him and his parents and how they're all viewing each other. So I think it definitely left a mark on it, and I get to visit that now in future books that I'm working on now that that's more of the focus of the story, instead of more of the basketball and grieving portion that Rez Ball had.

Rebecca: I know. It's so hard when you write something and you just desperately need your own story in it, and then you have to take that part out, and it’s other people telling you to take it out, and so you are mad about it but you take it out anyway, and then you end up thinking, ‘All right, I guess it’s better now.’

Byron: For sure. 100%. And I trust – you know, I work with Cynthia Leitich Smith, and I work with Rosemary Brosnan, and I work with my wonderful agent, Terrie Wolf, and I just … I believe all of them, because they're such brilliant storytellers, and they have so much experience in this industry that I'm still trying to gather and learn from. So if they say ‘I really feel this way or that way about this aspect of a scene or about this chapter,’ I just believe them, and I do my best to then work with that feedback that they're giving me. Instantly I'm like, ‘Okay, well, if that's what Cynthia thinks…’ or ‘if that's what Rosemary thinks…’ then there's a reason they say that and let's figure out how to better tell this story and save that thing maybe for some other story.

Rebecca: Yeah, those relationships are so important, especially with mentors.

As I read the book, I thought about a student that I had had in my student teaching semester, actually, so 16 years ago. His name was Kris, and he was Blackfeet and a devoted basketball player. Of course. We used to play together after school sometimes because I was the only teacher willing to supervise after-school weightlifting, and as I was reading the book, I could just picture him absolutely whooping his way through, especially through the basketball scenes. And I just wondered, did you have young boys like that really in your mind? Like, did you picture an audience as you were writing this? Or were you more thinking about the message as you were writing? Or was it both?

Byron: Initially, it was for teenage Indigenous males who liked basketball. That was it; it was super specific. And sometimes you can kind of create challenges for yourself when you want to make art that's that specific. It's like, if you're going to make the heaviest death metal band of all time, people who like Taylor Swift might not like your band, right? But it's a decision you're making, and it's the art you want to make. But then as I got deeper and further along, I started to figure out that you could do both. I could tell a story that was for those kids who loved basketball, didn't like reading, wanted something fast paced and moving, but then I was like, but that's not just life. Like, even if you are a high schooler who's playing basketball, there's more than basketball, right? Like, ‘what else is happening in your life?’ And that's where the universal aspects of the story started to blossom in those later versions of the book, when I thought, ‘Well, what's his love life look like? What do his friendships look like? What’s school look like?’ And that's when I think it became something that anyone else could listen to. You know, we turned down those heavy guitars, and we turned down the sound of the snare a little bit, and we made it something that was a little more palpable and a little more digestible for anyone to pick up and read or listen to and say, ‘Oh, hey, I hear the message in this.’ And so it was really pulling back some of the strings and just letting the story kind of tell itself, and I think that's when it started to become more of a universal story, so I had my intention initially, and then I went to write a better story. It opened the story up to being something that I hope anybody could pick up and see something in that they understand or get.

Rebecca: I love that, because I think sometimes, especially in the English classroom, the argument for ‘Classics’ is that their themes are universal, and the pushback from teachers is ‘Okay, but universal for whom?’ Yes, some Charles Dickens is still applicable today. He's my favorite author. I will continue to read him. But Young Adult Literature can be universal as well, and I think more so, especially for young people. So, yeah, I love that.

Byron: I think with how fast the world is constantly changing and getting into different generations who are saying, you know, ‘skibidi rizz’ and ‘six-seven’ and the like, and then that's only a thing for like a flash in the pan, right? Like for just one week. So I think contemporary young adult literature is so important. I think if they can see social media or a video game or a smartphone in someone's hand – because this younger generation has never seen a world without social media. They've never seen a world without a smartphone or an iPad or YouTube or Minecraft or Fortnite. So how in the heck are they going to understand language that sounds different, from 100 years ago? It's hard to understand what someone's saying, just the way it's hard for us to understand when kids are saying what they're saying. You're like, ‘Wait, what?’ At least having the technology and the world that they're in, the contemporary setting, it's super important to getting kids into reading because our attention spans are shrinking down to like, seven seconds, because we're just used to these short bits of reels and TikToks. But then you're going to read a book that's so dense or so hard for them to understand, it's going to turn them off from reading, and they're going to go, ‘What is this? I don't even like this thing. I'm back to my iPad.’ If you can get them something where a kid's on his iPad watching a Minecraft video of a streamer, they’ll think, ‘I get that, you know, let me read the rest of this chapter.’ I think shifting towards contemporary is the only way we're going to salvage young readers. You can get them on the contemporary side. Then later you can say, ‘Here's Charles Dickens,’ or ‘Here's Shakespeare,’ or here's something now that they're like, ‘Oh, I like reading. I've trained my brain to sit and read for 15 minutes straight.’ Yeah, then you can show them the classics.

Rebecca: Yeah, I agree. I think it has to be a building of the reading muscle first and what they like because why would you try something that you couldn't even access if you've never even been able to read something you could access before. So, yeah, super important to get the Young Adult novels in there and build their build their love. Show them that there's books out there that are about them and that they can read without the teacher. I think it’s so important.

Byron: When I was reading Shakespeare in school, I needed the Cliff’s Notes, and I needed to watch the Leonardo DiCaprio movie. When I watched the movie, I thought, ‘Oh, that's what they're saying when they’re describing this or that’ or ‘Oh, this scene, I get it now.’ I needed those additional resources, the Cliff’s Notes and the movie, for me to understand a single line.

Rebecca: Mmhmm. I think half the teachers need the Cliff’s Notes and the movie, too! I always tell my students that I think Shakespeare, whom I refer to as Willie Shakes, would absolutely love today's generation. They are gender-bending. They're making up their own words. They're doing, I mean, they're so inventive. I think he would have absolutely dug it. He would have been so into it. And they always respond with, ‘What are you talking about?’ And I say, ‘Y'all, he did the literal same stuff. It was just 400 years ago, so we can’t understand it!’ So, yeah, I love that so much.

So I played basketball – never at the level that you did – I was far too small. And by the time I turned 14, I was like, ‘I just want to do homework.’ But my grandma played basketball, too, back when women still had to wear skirts to play and could only play half court, and she loved it so much. And when she got to watch me play, she was so excited, and I was reading some of the Goodreads reviews for Rez Ball, and there was a gal down in Oklahoma who said that ‘Rez Ball is a love letter to community.’ And that really struck me. And I was wondering if you could talk about the importance of community in your life, but also on the rez, in particular?

Byron: When I was playing basketball, I would go to, say, pick up the mail for my mom, and the lady working at the post office would say, ‘Oh my god, I watched your game last night. And when you dove on the floor and saved the ball…,’ or I would go to a community event, and our tribal chairman would come up and shake my hand and say, ‘Good luck in the playoffs.’ Anywhere I went and everywhere I went on our reservation, I could be at a powwow, and a young kid would come and, like, crawl onto my shoulders and like, tell me they were going to be better at basketball than me someday, kind of having that Indian Humor moment. And so anywhere I went and everywhere I went, being this, like, shy, introverted kid before basketball to then being completely welcomed and absorbed and championed in my community by anyone and everyone – kids, teenagers, elderly – I all of a sudden felt like my family had grown, and it wasn't just my mom and dad and my siblings, but literally anywhere I went, I would get a high five or, you know, someone would dap me up. And so I started to feel like I belonged, and, being someone who has lighter skin and not dressing like a lot of my peers, I had always felt, especially in a Native American community, like I didn't belong or I didn't fit in, and that a lot of the bullying was around that, so getting to feel welcomed and cheered on by everyone in my community because of basketball at that time was such a beautiful thing for me.

But I think community extends to whatever group that you're working in or cheering on or belonging to, right? Because now I belong to the literary community, and I get to go meet all different readers and different authors and people who work in the industry, and it all feels that same thing where it's like this family and I support all these other authors, and they support me, and we cheer each other on. So community can be whatever kind of thing you're working on or doing, but it can be beautiful. It can be helpful, you know? It can make you feel like you're welcome and belong, but I think it's also something that as we grow in that industry or field, or as we get that experience, we also have to make sure that we're then nurturing the people who are brand new, or stepping in that door for the first time, and paying it forward. And that's what continues to help grow and blossom and nurture it.

Rebecca: Yeah, I think, especially as I'm listening you talk about how there was still bullying, but once you did something that was in the spotlight that that kind of pulled back, I feel like you're also expanding the types of community members who get recognized, right? Because, yeah, you were a star basketball player, but now also you're writing. You do paint your fingernails, and you do dye your hair, so it's cool to do that now, right? Kids might think, ‘Oh, Byron does that. I could do it,’ and so you're making the community even better by being yourself.

Byron: Thank you. When I go to book events or I go to school visits, it's always at the very end where a couple of kids will come up who are wearing, like, a My Chemical Romance shirt, or a boy with his nails painted, or a boy who doesn't have his nails painted, they'll come up and they'll have a moment where they bond with me, and they're the ones who wait till everyone's gone because they don't want to talk next to or near anybody. They don't want to be within earshot. They wait until the very end, and then they come up and, for example, I had a teenage boy at a school visit recently, tell me, ‘I wish I could paint my fingernails. I think it looks so cool, but I'm afraid. I'm scared because we're in this really rural middle of nowhere Minnesota town.’ And I was like, ‘I totally get it,’ but it was cool being able to know that. It's still scary for me. Sometimes, depending on where I am, I'll notice I'll kind of curl my fingernails in depending on where I'm at or who I’m talking to. And I know, like the other day, I was complaining to my fiancé that I was in a mall food court, and it was busy. There was like 100 people there, and every single person – babies, kids, teenagers, older people, people my age, whatever – eventually I'd feel eyes on me, and I'd look up and someone was looking at me, and I was like, oh, well, you know, it feels awkward. I'm just trying to eat. But then I was like, I bring it on myself: I'm the one wearing a cheetah print hat with usually purple or pink hair and nails. Part of it is me bringing it on myself, but it is part of why I do what I do and part of why I dress the way I dress. Because sometimes it's like, it would be easier for me to not spend time doing my nails or my hair. I could just wear a white t-shirt and jeans, and my life would be a little easier. But one, I wouldn't feel like myself, and two, I would be thinking I know there's a kid out there or a person out there somewhere who needs to also see a version of themselves, and I've had that. Prince was that for me. David Bowie was that for me. Dennis Rodman was that for me. So there's been… I've had my own role models who were androgynous or just said, ‘Fuck the norm’ and were just like, ‘I'm just gonna be myself.’ And I always thought that was just the coolest thing.

Rebecca: I love that you brought up Dennis Rodman, because one year for Christmas, my brother bought our dad the Dennis Rodman book!

Byron: Oh Bad as I Wanna Be?

Rebecca: Yeah, and I was just thinking ‘this is amazing.’ Perfection. Also, Dennis Rodman, what a time we were living in, right? [we laughed a lot during this exchange!]

Also, though, I cannot wait to share your book with one of my absolute best friends that I met through our mom’s club. Her name is Sam, and she has a mohawk that she dyes all the colors of the rainbow, and she has three boys, and she's such a good mom. One of them has really long hair, doesn't dye it, but the middle one and the younger one love to have a mohawk just like their mom and dye it different colors. And they're six and ten, and I just love it so much. But I think she sometimes feels the way you do, like the mohawk maybe makes her stand out. But she said, even recently, people have actually been complimenting it instead of being weird about it. And so I think you're right: the more people are themselves, the more people can be themselves.

So I want to just switch over. I have a bonus question: were your Star Wars and Yoda references a nod to Eric Gansworth?

Byron: You know, that's funny. Um, he's one of my favorite authors. If I Ever Get Out of Here is one of my favorite books. So good. I've read it a couple times.

Yeah, it hadn't crossed my mind. I just grew up watching a lot of Star Wars, and when I was finishing up high school, the prequels started to come out, and I loved, I was like, one of the only people, I guess, at the time, who loved the prequels. I thought they were amazing, and so I just always loved Star Wars. My mom is a huge Star Wars fan. I think part of her world and spiritual views have been impacted by the idea of Star Wars and the Force and feeling the universe and feeling that God-like energy that's in all of us and how to use it for good. So I think a lot of her teachings came from stuff she probably heard from Yoda, and then she tells me, so I didn't realize it, but yeah. I even have an R2D2 tattoo.

Rebecca: Oh my gosh, yes, that’s amazing!

Byron: But, yeah, I hadn't even put two and two together. But, you know, sometimes I think about how much is subconsciously in my mind, like song lyrics, movies I've watched, books I've read, conversations I've had with people that when I'm writing a scene, maybe I don't realize that's like the scene that it stemmed from but I always wonder that all the time. I'm obsessed with music, so I probably have 1000s of albums worth of lyrics in my head, and sometimes I worry when I'm writing something, ‘Is this a lyric from a song? Am I ripping something off?’ Or is it just me being impacted and affected by it, but still creating something that's just influenced by it, and not just ripping something off?

Rebecca: Meh, all writing is intertextual, right?!

I knew, I knew you liked Eric Gansworth. I really love him as well, but I know he absolutely loves Yoda. I was not on the prequel bandwagon until I watched the Clone Wars series, and then you go back and watch it, and you're like, ‘Oh, these are actually great, but you just needed these seven seasons of information to get it, so…’

Byron: I think it's super hard when you think about now that we've seen so many TV series, and they're 10 episodes and 52 minutes for each episode, and that's telling a story – almost 10 hours’ worth of time, but back, like for so long until today, you're like, here's two hours to make this all interesting, for this all to make sense, for this all the matter. And that's really hard to do. And when a movie is two and a half hours, or two hours and 45 minutes, I always hear people complain, ‘Oh, that movie was so long.’ And I'm thinking, you just been binge-watched all of Breaking Bad, 500 hours, or whatever. That wasn't too long, right? But a movie, for some reason… Yeah, sometimes we wonder why we have a harder time getting into movies, but I'm thinking it's because we don't let them be as long as they need to be. Yeah so I think those prequels could have been better if they could have been a series.

Rebecca: Oh, for sure, yeah, I agree. So last question, kind of a mix: why was it important to do a collaborative piece like Legendary Frybread Drive-In, and then can you tell us about what the future is holding?

Byron: So I got to be included with so many of my all-time favorite authors, like Darcie Little Badger, who's a hero of mine, and Eric Gansworth, another hero of mine. So I always joke – we were talking about the Dream Team earlier – I feel like the Christian Laettner of the Dream Team, like everyone's thinking, ‘Why is he on the team? We got Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, … and Christian Leitner. One of these things is not like the others.’ But I also, being a huge comic book fan and loving the connected universes like the MCU or comic books, it was cool getting to work with the other authors and seeing, ‘What are you doing with yours? What am I doing with mine? How could we have some intermingling or crossover of characters?’ Some of the characters from the other stories are in the background of mine. You just see them. And if you read their story first, you would know, ‘Oh, hey, that's that other story that Jen Ferguson wrote, or something along those lines. I thought that was really fun to do. The interconnectedness, that's just how Indian Country is, and what it's like being on a reservation. For example, someone downstairs [at the conference] was telling us a story of how she was talking about Rez Ball in Bemidji, and someone said, ‘Oh, Byron's my cousin.’ And that's what you see the whole time in this anthology is how anyone and everyone can be connected. And I think that's definitely an Indigenous thing in story.

Rebecca: I loved that about Ancestor Approved. I haven’t started Legendary Frybread Drive-In yet, and so I was thinking, ‘Oh, I wonder if that's going to be the same?’

Byron: I went back and read that when I got asked to do the Legendary Frybread. I had read Ancestor Approved before, but I wanted to read it one more time as I was writing mine to be thinking, ‘How did they do this?’

For the future, I have Medicine Wheels, which is Rez Ball, but stripping away the community, and stripping away that family life, and making this character's journey a lot harder. Just like you do when you're writing a story, you're constantly making that main character's journey harder. For me, from book one to book two, it was like, well, everything that Tre had, what if we took that all away? And skateboarding, you don't have a gymnasium full of people cheering you on. And this kid is learning how to skateboard, kind of by himself, going through a really tough summer, and it becomes this beautiful distraction. And the message for kids is what do you love? What are you passionate about? Because your dark days, whether they're here or coming, will be part of your life. And what's going to be your escapism, what's going to be your coping mechanism? And so for me, that message is find it, embrace it, hold on to it, because you're going to need it. And that's what this kid learns in Medicine Wheels, and that'll be out this summer.

Rebecca: Oh, I love that so much. It sounds so good.

Byron: Yeah, I'm excited.

Rebecca: I can't wait. And the video game one that you talked about earlier, I think is going to be – that sounds like it's going to be amazing as well. And I already know so many people that I
would share it with.

Byron: Yeah, Moccasin Games came up as an idea for me as I was exploring my gender identity and my gender expression and knowing how I used video game avatars and characters to comfortably, more safely explore that side of myself first. Being able to be in that virtual world and being able to dress how I wanted and look how I wanted, and then I thought, ‘What if there's a younger teenager who is trying to find themselves, and they do it via a video game? And that was kind of the genesis of the idea, not the Sega Genesis. [We laughed hard at this excellent ‘90s joke]
That’s how I came up with the whole story of these kids who are gamers, who haven't even met in real life, and then the dynamics of the people who have a lot of money, who can pay for all the power ups and weapons and better things, and then the kids who don't have any money and just have to be crafty or sharper, smarter. So it's exploring those real-world dynamics of wealth division and different separations in communities and cities, rural areas, and how there can be an even playing field in different ways, and then just being able to explore that other side of yourself through a video game. So there's those two different storylines happening. It's definitely, again, very personal and things that I didn't get to explore in Rez Ball.

Rebecca: Oh my gosh, I love that, because the online community is a totally different version of community that people who are not a part of it, I think, think doesn't exist or is not as good as ‘real life’ community. But also I love it because books are a way for kids to explore different things, right? And video games are literature, and so treating them that way in the book, it's super meta.

Byron: Yeah!

Rebecca: Yeah, I love that. Well, we were here longer than I thought we would be, but you gave way amazing answers.

Byron: Thank you.

Rebecca: I appreciate it.

Byron: My pleasure.

Rebecca: Thank you so much, Byron.

Byron: Of course.

What We are Reading During Native American and Indigenous Peoples’ Heritage Month

11/5/2025

Before We Get Started Checkout the 2026 Summit

Meet our Contributor:

Stephanie Branson is a fierce advocate for young adult literature and authentic writing pedagogy, with a focus on fostering student engagement through diverse text selections. She has been a literacy leader as a high school English teacher, district-level learning facilitator, and curriculum writer in one of Texas’s largest public school districts for the past 13 years. Stephanie earned her undergraduate degree from Louisiana State University in the Geaux Teach English cohort and her graduate degree from the University of North Texas in Literacy Curriculum and Instruction. She has presented at both the National Council for Teachers of English and the Texas Council of Teachers of English Language Arts. She can be reached at [email protected]. Please connect!

What We are Reading During Native American and Indigenous Peoples’ Heritage Month by Stephanie Branson

“We gratefully acknowledge the Native Peoples on whose ancestral homelands we gather, as well as the diverse and vibrant Native communities who make their home here today.”
—NMAI Land Acknowledgment

I have always looked forward to autumn and the month of November. It is a month of falling leaves, crisp air, and family gatherings that leave nostalgic memories in their wake. In my adulthood, I have come to honor November for a deeper reason: it is a time to celebrate and reflect upon my Native American heritage. My family always knew we had Indigenous lineage, but with DNA tracing and intergenerational family research, our roots have become richly intertwined with the Pacific Northwestern Yakama Nation through Canada and beyond.

My grandmother was a “rez kid” in the Washington state nation until she was adopted off of the reservation by her family. Through careful, deep research and legal file requests, we were able to uncover her whole story; a story that deserves its own telling. But that is a writing for another day. Today, I want to share some of my favorite YA novels and nonfiction books to celebrate Native American and Indigenous Peoples’ Heritage Month. It is such a joy to be able to lift these voices up and celebrate the stories they tell.

Every November, since its foundation in 1990, our country acknowledges the contributions, history, and culture of Native and Indigenous peoples across the Americas. We come together to reflect on the beauty of storytelling, vibrant cultural showcases, and reverent art exhibits. In the vibrance of celebration, there is also solemn reflection. As we look back, we grieve communities lost to colonialism, genocide, displacement, and cultural erasure. Above all, we recognize that Indigenous cultures are not relics of the past, but living and evolving communities in our present time.

Growing up, my access to these perspectives in texts were little to none, at least to my younger knowledge; and if you could find texts of any kind they tended to be written by non-Native authors and insensitive to the cultures they were representing. My first forays into Native American and Indigenous novels were Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins and Elizabeth George Speare's The Sign of the Beaver. I am grateful for these novels that first guided me on my journey as a reader exploring cultural identity.

Today, I am honored to share the authentic voices and beautifully crafted narratives of contemporary Native American, First Peoples, and Indigenous authors whose works continue to expand and enrich our literary landscape. These authors’ works honor richly embedded traditions while deepening and diversifying the modern landscape of Young Adult literature.

One of my personal favorite texts is the dystopian novel, The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline. Dimaline, a writer and a member of the Georgian Bay Métis Council of the Métis Nation of Ontario, weaves a beautiful tale of love, perseverance, resistance, loss, survival, and most of all, hope. Defying the bounds of typical YA dystopian fiction, The Marrow Thieves guides the reader through the complexities and tragedies of colonialism and genocide of Indigenous peoples. I was captivated by the storytelling, character relationships, and my own connection to the First Nations in Canada. As a continuation, Hunting by Stars is a brilliant continuation of the world Dimaline builds in her magical dystopia.

Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley is another one of my favorite novels that does not squarely fit into any singular genre, aside from realistic fiction. It is part romance, part crime thriller and wholly a narrative about cultural belonging. The author’s profound connection to her culture lies at the heart of this book, illuminating every turn of the plot and infusing the story with its full depth and meaning. Her depiction of the Ojibwe culture, teachings, and traditions are precise and allow non-Native readers to truly understand the intricacies of the story. This is a book beyond storytelling; it is a lyrical commentary on connection, micro-aggressions, and calls to action.

I truly adore Eric Gansworth’s collection of YA novels. They are poignant, creative, and are crafted with such nuance and lyricism that they are just a joy to read. I always walk away having learned more about native nations, cultural heritage, and the rich traditions of the Onondaga Nation. Gansworth, an enrolled member of Onondaga Nation and descendent of Tuscarora Nation himself, wrote If I Ever Get Out of Here, and Apple: Skin-to-the-Core: two profoundly moving and inspirational works that explore identity, culture, and resilience. If I Ever Get Out of Here follows Lewis “Shoe” Blake, a Tuscarora Indian reservation teen navigating the challenges of coming into his adolescence on and off the reservation. Gansworth weaves humor, music (specifically The Beatles), and complexities of teen boys into a story about real friendship, belonging, and cultural understanding.

Apple: Skin to the Core, a memoir-in-verse by Gansworth, reclaims the slur against some Native and Indigenous peoples of “apple:” red on the outside, white on the inside. Through this memoir, he transforms the apple into a symbol of strength and power shattering the connotations of the slur and reclaiming the power of his identity. Gansworth writes his story through pictures and poetic verse in a way that is both innovative and truly heartbreaking. This novel is a testament to the power of one’s resilience and reclamation of one’s self though story and the brutal history of our county’s oppression of Native and Indigenous peoples.

The nonfiction text, Indigenous Ingenuity by Deidre Havrelock (Cree) and Edward Kay is a remarkable study of the contributions that have been brought to our society by Native and Indigenous peoples. This book is a fascinating analysis of the innovation, science, and creativity embedded in our society from Native and Indigenous cultures across North America. The authors blend historical accounts with technological advancements, showing how knowledge, tradition, and systems have long impacted a variety of fields we engage with today, such as engineering, sustainability, and astronomy. This text is a celebration of the culture that is a foundational component of who we are as a society today. It frames the generations of knowledge and observation that we have taken from these communities with reverence and beauty.

I wanted to end this recommendation list with perhaps the most moving work I have read. American Sunrise by Joy Harjo, 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States and member of Muscogee (Creek) Nation, is an authentically vivid account of generational history from an ancestral home due to the Indian Removal Act. This recollection is told through a series of poetry and prose that defies genre bounds. Perhaps it is my newer understanding of my own roots, but I felt the sadness, grief, and remembrance in these poems deeply. Harjo’s writing sings with memory and resilience providing penetrating and powerful verse of survival, erasure, and transcendence. Each poem and mixed-media form in this collection feels like a whispered prayer of reflection. Harjo seamlessly weaves the historical view of the Trail of Tears with her autobiographical experiences. She invites readers to remember, reflect upon, and internalize the power of poetry on our world. She shows that we can use this form to recount events that are painful and turn them into something beautiful.

“Bless us, these lands, said the rememberer. These lands aren’t our lands. These lands aren’t your lands. We are this land.” -Joy Harjo, An American Sunrise, “Bless This Land”

These stories, rooted in history and alive with strength and resistance, invite readers to see the world through perspectives that have been sidelined too often today. We are transported into storytelling and history through Native and Indigenous eyes: eyes that remember, eyes that teach, eyes that imagine, and eyes that reclaim. Each text we read from a Native or Indigenous perspective reminds us that literature is not just entertainment or a passive time spent. It is a vessel for cultural reconciliation and truth-telling. As educators and readers, we carry the responsibility to seek out and elevate these voices. We must ensure these voices are uplifted within the classrooms and beyond.

This November, and always, may we read these stories with intention, teach with reverence, and honor the voices that came before and continue to shape our cultural landscape of who we are as a society and who we may become.

YA Summit 2026: How You Can Participate

10/27/2025

Why We Have YA Summits

Since 2018, a group of YA scholars and enthusiasts have been gathering either in persons or online to discuss the teaching and research of Young Adult Literature. This field remains robust. It continues to grow as many more scholars and teachers realize the value of using YA literature in their classrooms.

Those of us who spent time in the classroom realize that we had students who didn't read what we offered in our fairly traditional selections of literature, yet they read books written directly for them. Many students read volume after volume of large science fiction tomes, dove into the worlds of Twilight, the Hunger Games, or Divergent, or devoured the romances of Stephanie Perkins, Jenny Han, or Sarah Dessen.

What do we do with this awareness that many of our students who can read but don't read what we offer, yet read many other things?

We can keep doing the same old things or we might try to incorporate the books students are interrested in to achieve our curriculiar goals.

This delimma is a long and on going discussion. Much longer than a single blog post.

The 2026 Summit, however, is a place for the energetic discussion the teaching, the researh and advocacy for Young Adult Literature.

How Can You Participate This Year.

The next Summit is happening February 26 and 27, 2026 in an online format. Here is the link to summit webpage. On the summit webpage you can find the Call for Proposals, Conference registration, and information about past programs.

The first step is to plan to attend the Summit. Put it on your calendar and get ready to join the conversation.

The next step is to consider submitting a proposal yourself and help steer the conversation around something that fuels your academic interests.

Information on the Current Summit

cfp_summit_2026.pdf
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Take a Look at Some of the Past Authors Who Have Participated as Presenters and Discussants

The Summit has valued the active participation of YA authors. Over the years, the organizers have felt that listening to authors discuss their process and have them listen to the way researchers and teachers adds to the overall discussion.

Authors are valued participants in the summit and they are encouraged to submit their own proposals.

Stay tuned, you just might fined another you are interested in participating in the Summit as the proposals come in and the program is finalized.

Take a look as the authors who have participated in the past. Maybe one of your favorites is listed.

It was great fun to look back through the past summit and reminices about all of the authors the summit has hosted in the past. I hope to see you at the 2026 Summit in February of 2026.

Reacquainted with the Weird: A Journey Through Shirley Jackson’s Works

10/22/2025

Meet Our Contributor:

Roy Edward Jackson is an assistant professor of education at Goshen College in Indiana with a focus on literacy. He holds degrees in English, Education and School Library Science.

Reacquainted with the Weird: A Journey Through Shirley Jackson’s Works by Roy Jackson

I love Halloween. But this year, I found myself a bit stuck on what to write about. I wandered through my campus library looking for inspiration, yet nothing caught my interest. I scrolled endlessly through my social media feeds, but nothing stood out there either. Then, a few weeks ago at my local public library, I read that my friend and writing mentor had been nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award. That news sent me spiraling back to my last year teaching high school language arts before moving into higher education.

I had taught at a creative and performing arts high school where my senior creative writing majors were reading Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle as a mentor text. We used a PDF version—no doubt a cost-saving measure—but I realized I had never actually held the book in my hands. And a digital PDF, I contend, is nowhere near the experience of holding a printed book. I made my way to the YA section, where I was immediately struck by the fantastic covers of the reissues of Jackson’s seminal works. I gathered a stack and began re-reading her stories, one by one, as if meeting an old friend anew.

My high school creative writers loved We Have Always Lived in the Castle. The urban public high school came with all sorts of academic, and geographical, freedom. We had the kind of freedom that let us take our learning beyond the classroom walls to the streets of our city. So, we made our way to the Carnegie Central Library and perused Jackson’s collection. Most were shelved in the YA collection. The students choose in partnerships a Jackson short story for a comparative writerly activity. I feared they would find this boring, but the engagement was strong, and they alerted me to stories I’d never read. We culminated the unit with watching the stylistic 2018 film adaptation.

Looking back, there was so much more I wish I had done with my student writers. I could have emphasized Jackson’s role as a female writer in a male-dominated industry, her groundbreaking work as a speculative writer, and the way she masterfully blended the real world with the uncanny. Since these students attended a creative and performing arts high school with a creative writing concentration, I wish I had been more familiar with Jackson’s lectures at the time.

In the collection Come Along With Me, her lecture “Biography of a Story” recalls the day she sent off The Lottery to The New Yorker. Written only three weeks earlier, Jackson herself may not have realized just how groundbreaking the story would be. In the lecture, she describes the flood of letters forwarded to her by the magazine, noting that there were “three main themes which dominate the letters that first summer—three themes which might be identified as bewilderment, speculation, and plain old-fashioned abuse” (214).

In the age of social media, students might find compelling connections between those public responses and the way readers react to writing today. Even more striking, those letters were handwritten and delivered through the mail. I can’t help but wonder if my students could truly grasp the impact of receiving such a thing.

Reading We Have Always Lived in the Castle with my high school writers took me back to my only experience with Shirley Jackson in high school. Like most, it was the short story The Lottery, one of the most vivid reading memories from my own high school years. Having been reared on Steinbeck, Hawthorne, Melville, and even Salinger, all taught by mostly white, male teachers, The Lottery was a game changer. It was new to me in both form and genre. While I had read traditional horror novels and novellas, The Lottery was my first true foray into speculative fiction. The gut punch it delivers to first-time readers is jarring and, strangely enough, a special kind of reading experience.

At the time, I did not think much about authorship, but in retrospect, Jackson stands out as a woman writing in a genre long dominated by men, a reality that persists even today. I had been inundated with the white, male dominance of the literary canon, and I wish my teachers had pointed out how rare it was to encounter a female voice in horror, mystery, or speculative fiction.

I think in today’s world of the “new weird,” laying the foundation with what Jackson created is essential for both readers and writers. The Lottery is a seminal work, but so are The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. In our educational landscape, where long-form reading and student choice have often evaporated in favor of short, prompt-based writing aimed at higher standardized test scores, I find that not only educators like me but also students are longing for both depth and freedom.

Shirley Jackson feels like the perfect writer to begin with this time of year. Students can enter her speculative world through The Lottery and engage in rich discussions about community and superstition — “Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.”

They can also consider how little it takes to bend our own world to make it frightening, and how true horror may not lie in mass violence, but in a world so familiar to our own that only the slightest distortion reveals the darkest parts of human nature.

After entering through the most famous of her short works, students could choose among Jackson’s novels like The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and find companion short stories such as “The Witch,” “Flower Garden,” and “Like Mother Used to Make.” Discussions of the short form could focus on when and how Jackson so effectively pivots the familiar world into the speculative. Novel studies could take on a book club format, allowing students to guide their own conversations and see what develops organically. I can’t help but wonder if themes like social isolation and persecution, gothic domesticity, and the slow descent into madness through solitude would emerge naturally in their discussions.

All of this could culminate in at-home or in-class viewings of film adaptations. From the 1960s Encyclopedia Britannica produced an almost too realistic short movie version of The Lottery to the less faithful 1996 adaptation, students could see how different directors interpret Jackson’s work. There are also two fascinating adaptations of The Haunting of Hill House (1963 and 1999), along with the visually stunning 2018 film version of We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Lastly, there is the biopic (2020), Shirley, starring Elizabeth Moss that is a great companion piece to her lectures.

This kind of exploration reflects what I loved most about teaching at a public creative and performing arts high school—and what seems largely absent in traditional schools so focused on testing: the creative writing project. Through carefully curated prompts, students could emulate how to bend their natural world ever so slightly to make it weird, horrific, and most importantly, point a lens the way Jackson did on our societal norms that are so weird to begin with.

Reacquainting myself with Shirley Jackson’s wonderfully weird works has been a reminder of the enduring power of her writing: how it challenges us to see the ordinary as strange, to question the rules we take for granted, and to recognize that horror and insight often emerge from the smallest shifts in perspective. For students, for educators, and for readers of all ages, engaging with her work offers not only a journey into the uncanny but also a model for how to make the familiar extraordinary. Particularly when living in extraordinary times when the strange seems to have become the norm.

Jen Calonita - Fairy Godmother and Tinker Bell

10/15/2025

Meet Our Contributor:

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.

Jen Calonita - Fairy Godmother and Tinker Bell

Storytelling is one of our oldest and most magical arts. Stories help us make sense of the world; they help us connect across generations, learn empathy, entertain each other, and share culture. We hear “once upon a time” or “there once was a” or “a long time ago” and something in us settles in for story time. There is a long literary history of fairy tale and myth retellings that make old stories new again, making them relevant for new generations. Retellings of myths, fairy tales, and classic tales from literature or movies offers a rich landscape for creativity and cultural dialogue. Authors ask, “What if…” and imagine a new life for characters that we know well from old stories. Retellings allow new generations of storytellers to reinterpret and reimagine these stories, to personalize them, to make them relevant for new audiences.

Retelling myths and classic stories connects us to our past, preserving cultural heritage and continuity. These stories are shared cultural touchstones, and by retelling them, we keep them alive. This helps us understand the values, fears, and aspirations of those who came before us. Expanding on these stories in new formats or updated retellings keeps these connections fresh, showing how universal themes—like love, betrayal, heroism, and sacrifice—are still relevant today.

Many traditional tales include outdated or problematic themes, particularly regarding gender, race, and power dynamics. Retelling these stories allows us to critique, reinterpret, and update them, aligning the narratives with current values and perspectives. For example, reimagining “Beauty and the Beast” as a story about empathy and mutual respect, or Shakespeare’s works as explorations of modern political themes, allows new generations to connect with the stories in a way that aligns with contemporary values.

Jen Calonita

Jen Calonita, one of my favorite middle grade and young adult authors, is currently reimagining some of my favorite childhood Disney movies. Fairy Godmother asks, How does one become a fairy godmother? How did Cinderella’s fairy godmother become a fairy godmother? Her newest novel, Tinker Bell, considers Tinker Bell’s backstory. Who was she before The Lost Boys? Retellings offer a blend of the familiar and the unexpected, which can be both comforting and intriguing for audiences—Jen’s retellings of these stories draw our attention to characters who were not the main characters in the Disney movies.

Mentor Text

The National Writing Project defines mentor texts “ pieces of literature that you…can return to and reread for many different purposes. They are texts to be studied and imitated… Mentor texts help students to take risks and be different writers tomorrow than they are today. It helps them to try out new strategies and formats.” Jen Calonita’s novels serve as a master class in the art and craft of writing.

Fairy Godmother

One of the particular strengths of Jen’s writing is her skill at descriptive hooks that pull the reader into the story. Her opening for Fairy Godmother, for example, does a deep dive into the blue dress that Cinderella wore at the ball BUT what it does well is provide insight into Renee, our new main character.

Consider the opening:

Well, she’d done one thing right. Blue, it was clear, was the girl’s color.

To call the gown blue, however, was doing it a disservice. The color was more a cross between azure and cyan. Brighter than a clear summer day, the tone was practically luminescent, the exact shade of the girl’s eyes, which, Renee thought, getting misty, were the same shade as her mother’s. In fact, it was Ella’s mother’s gown she’d transformed that night. Was she watching this all from somewhere in the universe? (Fairy Godmother, Calonita, p. 1)

Notice the mix of sentences, the description of blue, and the rich vocabulary in the passage. There is so much that the students can use as a mentor for their writing. While the description focuses on the beautiful blue dress that we all remember from the movie, we gain insight into Renee. We see her connection to Ella, to Ella’s mother, and to her role as fairy godmother.

What Students Can Do

After Vanderbilt’s 2024 win against Alabama, Marissa and Elizabeth (two students) used the opening as a mentor text and created the following piece of writing:

To call the team’s jerseys black, however, was doing them a disservice. The color was more a cross between ebony and sable. Glossier and deeper than a starless summer night, the tone was practically pitch, the exact shade of charcoal, which, the Commodores thought, eyes glinting with determination, stood in stark contrast to the losing Crimson Tide. In fact, it was this team that finally anchored down that night. What did they think when the odds finally turned in our favor?

We learn more about Renee through her actions. We see her humor and playfulness: “Renée was never beneath putting a leaf under her nose to make a mustache, dancing in the river (when it wasn’t moving this fast), or singing loud off-key. Anything to keep the two of them laughing. It was her favorite sound in the world.” This can serve as an example of characterization implied by characters’ actions. Or we can look at how she uses dialogue to further a relationship between characters.

“‘I like mysteries,’ he says as a new song began to play. ‘They remind me of peeling onions. Something new in every layer.’

‘Or a bruised apple,’ she offered. ‘Sometimes the fruit underneath is unexpectedly crisp.”

This can serve as a model for students who are trying to write dialogue that shows something about the characters. We learn a great deal about Renee, Cinderella’s fairy godmother, and her backstory throughout the novel.

Tinker Bell

The novel, Tinker Bell, opens with a deep dive into Tinker Bell as a character:

Tinker Bell had never been fond of the word NO.

            Or can’t.
            Or impossible.

They were useless sentiments, really. They certainly never served Tinker Bell well. Not when she was creating a (revolutionary) pixie dust replenishment system. Now when she was fixing a rain collector. Not lately, as Tink explored Never Land, searching for wonders, uncovering secrets. To Tink, impossible was just a problem to be solved. So, whenever the fairy encountered a block, Tinker Bell found a way to fly around it. (Tinker Bell, Calonita, p. 1)

The character description provides insight into a beloved character. We see her as a rebel and an inventor. She becomes more than the small fairy who flies around the Lost Boys. We see her strength and determination, but we also see her…attitude.

Tinker Bell introduces us to her best friend, Ash by describing him in terms of contrasts:

Ash was both Tink’s fiercest ally and greatest adversary. Her fairy confidant, conscience, and the only one she trusted to pick debris out of her wings. He drove her mad with his hovering. Sometimes he flew so close, Tink couldn’t tell if the sound of flapping was her wings or his. (Tinker Bell, Calonita, p. 7)

The language of this passage tells us a great deal about Ash and Tink’s relationship with him. It is also a good mentor text for students. As a writing teacher, I would use it as a dependent authorship text:

Prompt

Describe a person you care deeply about, an artist that you follow, or a character that you really like using the following template:

Name of the Main Person/Artist/Character:

__________ was both __________ (person with whom main character has a relationship with) __________ (adjective) __________ (noun) and __________ (adjective) __________ (noun). Her __________ (noun), __________ (noun), and the only one __________ (person with whom main character has a relationship with) trusted to __________ (clause). __________ (pronoun) drove __________ (pronoun) mad with ________ (pronoun). Sometimes __________ (pronoun) __________ (phrase), __________ (clause).

Both novels are rich and engaging novels that can serve as mentor texts for writers at any level. Jen’s writing is powerful and engaging. She takes old stories and shifts our view from the original main character to one of the supporting characters. Retellings offer an opportunity to tell stories from different perspectives, often those of characters who were marginalized or simplified in the original versions. This enriches the story world and can provide a fuller understanding of its characters and themes. Jen’s novels expand the story world and also provide strong mentor texts for writers.

Texts to Build Foundational Climate and Environmental Awareness with High School Students

10/8/2025

Meet Our Contributor:

Texts to Build Foundational Climate and Environmental Awareness with High School Students

The environment and climate are not just scientific areas to be studied but are significant forces influencing Earth that have clear social, cultural, and ethical implications. Introducing students to conversations about the environment requires careful and intentional framing that moves beyond larger concrete concepts and grounds discussions in the lived experiences of others. Teenagers are hard to please! Why should they care about something so beyond their current reality? Therein lies our charge as ethical educators in the public-school classroom.

Building foundational climate and environmental awareness within students can be a difficult topic to navigate in a way that maintains the classroom community when considering the real complexity of the related issues. The classroom provides an essential, safe space for this work, allowing young people to encounter ideas about human environmental relationships, ethical responsibilities of different groups, and sustainability through the lens of literature.

Young adult literature and nonfiction in particular offer a common and accessible ground for this initial exploration, merging a prior comfortability and ease with narrative and story with newer topics for critical inquiry. By guiding students to analyze characters’ relationships with place, a community’s impact on the environment, and consequences of actions, English and literacy teachers can cultivate both cultural and environmental empathy with critical literacy skills. Discussions around climate and the environment are multifaceted and challenging, especially when discussing the communities who live and confront this reality firsthand. An approach using young adult literature not only deepens reading and writing comprehension and analysis but also empowers students to consider their roles as humans and citizens within the larger context of our world.

My current junior-level English 3 students do not interact with these bigger ideas of climate, environmental impacts, and the ethics surrounding environmental issues on most days. They are busy living their teenage lives: going to school, practicing their musical pursuits, clobbering each other at athletics practice. Aside from a handful of scientifically-motivated students and to-the-core change makers, these students have a variety of other worries that are in their face impacting them daily; climate and the environment are two forces that feel “far” from them as these are not in their sphere of relevancy. This is where young adult literature comes in and has the ability to make significant impacts. If we can flood our classroom libraries with books that tactfully build foundational awareness surrounding climate and the environment, students will have the opportunity to open their minds and frame these concepts in the broader context of their lives.

Dry by Neal and Jarrod Shusterman is one of the most engaging, yet profound works of environmental criticism for young and teen readers. This novel, a fast-paced survival thriller, allows students to dig into the nuanced topics of ethical resource stewardship, resource declination, human morality, mob mentality, and social order disruption when extreme weather events occur. Paced around a water scarcity crisis in California, the two dual protagonists, Kelton and Alyssa, are faced with obstacles they must overcome to ensure their survival. Students will be able to make connections with our current society and the real-world consequences of environmental decisions, understanding how environmental stressors can affect communities, political and social systems, and individual decision-making.

Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi is another survival novel, this time taking place in a future that feels entirely dystopic. Rising sea levels and devastating hurricanes and weather events have transformed the now-Gulf Coast into a memory of its former self. Coastal cities, such as New Orleans, have been completely submerged and citizens have convened into tribes and factions based on their physical strengths and qualities. The protagonist, Nailer, works for a salvage crew of beached ships when a large hurricane brings in a luxurious ship with a sole survivor. The protagonist must decide whether to leverage the survivor for his gain or deliver her to safety. This text allows students to understand the outcomes of environmental collapse, systemic inequality, and the difficult moral choices that come up when survival is the only goal. Students can examine how power, gender and financial privilege, and resource scarcity come together, as well as reflect on how negative environmental changes disproportionately impact vulnerable communities.

Fault Lines by Nora Shalaway Carpenter takes a completely different approach to building climate and environmental awareness through forging intertwined relationships in this mostly-realistic fiction novel. This novel is set in the beautiful and magnetic current-day Appalachian West Virginia and follows two teens working through personal crises of their own. This novel centers around the criticism of and simultaneously need for fracking in America’s rural communities. Carpenter takes a thoughtful and nuanced approach to describing the lived experiences and true struggles of the communities in rural America – an approach that is both balanced and critical of the use of these lands for oil development. Whereas some works may simply criticize fracking and oil development with scathing commentary, Carpenter brings a fresh perspective with complexity and addresses these concerns with sensitivity. On one hand, fracking can destroy these lands held dear, but this industry also provides numerous jobs and opportunities to communities where employment is already scarce. Like I said, this book is nuanced and full of gray space. There is no clear right or wrong and students can discover the complexity of these issues with their own conclusions through the insights provided in this fictional community and relationship between the protagonists.

I hope these three novels can inspire a new focus to bookshelves, book clubs, or even a whole-class novel study and can engage conversations with students about the future of our world. If we all do our best to make our tiny piece of society better, I know we will be left with something more beautiful than we even have now. I want to leave this with my favorite quote from Dry: “Putting me at the forefront of his thoughts drew out what little energy he had left, just as when I had focused on helping him--and I realize that this is the true core of human nature: When we’ve lost the strength to save ourselves, we somehow find the strength to save each other

Using The Collectors edited by A. S. King in the iHgh School Classroom

10/1/2025

Meet our Contributor

Kate Youngblood has been teaching 9th and 11th grade English at Benjamin Franklin High School in New Orleans, Louisiana for the past eleven years. She graduated from Louisiana State University with a BA in English, secondary education. She later earned her M.A.Ed. from Wake Forest University. She has presented at the National Council of Teachers of English Annual Convention six times and has been published as a co-author in Signal Journal and English in Education. Kate was selected as the Louisiana State High School Teacher of the Year in 2021. She can be reached at [email protected].

The Collectors edited by A. S. King by Kate Youngblood

I live in a notoriously weird city.

In New Orleans, we wear costumes on weekdays, we second line at funerals, we gleefully rip heads off of crawfish before devouring them while out of towners look on in horror.

Weirdness in high school is often undervalued, however, even in a city as joyfully odd as New Orleans. High school students crave assimilation, believing adolescence will be easier if they fit in rather than stand out. I teach 9th graders, and one of my favorite parts about them is, especially in August, many still enter the school with their weirdness intact. I view it as part of my job to make them see those strange, different, out of sync parts of themselves as critical to their identity.

So, I was thrilled to read A.S. King’s foreword to her Printz award winning anthology, The Collectors: “There is currency in weirdness… There are no rules. There is no normal… You can be as weird as you want” (3).

This advice to students echoes so much about how I want my students to feel as they enter high school; to have a collection of short stories where weirdness was the operating principle felt like kismet.

My freshmen were assigned 5 of the short stories from this collection (though, of course, I encouraged them to read them all!): “Play House” by Anna-Marie McLemore, “Take It From Me” by David Levithan, “Ring of Fire” by Jenny Torres-Sanchez, “A Recording For Carole Before It All Goes” by Jason Reynolds, and “Sweet Everlasting” by M.T. Anderson.

These stories allowed us to dive deeply into identifying literary elements and techniques, building student confidence for their ability to notice the moves authors make and connecting them to their impact. “Play House” showed us how metaphors impact mood. “Take It From Me” made us question narrator reliability. “Ring of Fire” illuminated the power of symbols. “A Recording for Carole Before It All Goes” pushed syntax to the forefront of our discussions. “Sweet Everlasting” put characterization on full display.

These texts were all rich and layered, but still accessible to 9th graders. More importantly, they were all so obviously weird and different, making them exciting for students to discuss. More than 5 parents reached out to me to say that their kids were actually talking to them about the reading at home! One said she’d overheard her daughter on the phone with another students, animatedly saying, “But do you think the fire was real?” The stories did what great literature does: crept into their brains and their lives beyond the confines of the school building.

For our final project on the unit, students created a literary square analysis project, which I adapted from The Daring English Teacher. Here is the version that I gave my students: our project. Grading these projects did the same thing for me that reading the stories did for my students: it delighted me. I loved seeing their creative interpretations of the texts, I loved learning which students had read beyond the five required stories, I loved reading their pithy and funny and heartfelt reviews.

I always struggle with whether or not to start my 9th grade classes with a whole class novel. I like the experience of reading something together, in unison. But sometimes starting with a novel feels simultaneously over and underwhelming: students who are transitioning to a whole new world get bogged down in reading 20-30 pages a night and easily fall behind, class discussions sometimes take a while to heat up as the exposition drags on, and trust in me and my taste is under established.

This collection of short stories feels like the perfect solution. The texts are challenging and varied. The protagonists range from relatable to demonic (literally). There is some story in the anthology for each student. I am so happy to have found this collection which allowed me to set the tone for both the nitty gritty and the existential elements of my classroom: this is how we do English and this is how you do life.

A.S. King’s final words in the foreword anchor my class now: “Be defiantly creative. Make art of your life, especially if you don’t consider yourself an artist – collect all the little pieces of you and make your story. When you look back many years from now, you will see something extraordinary and impossible to duplicate. You will see you” (3).

What Are They Reading? Eighth Graders Give the Scoop on What They Recommend

9/24/2025

Meet our Contributor

Katie Sluiter has taught ELA in a small urban district near Grand Rapids, Michigan for over twenty years. She has her Ph.D. in English Education from Western Michigan University. Her current research involves teaching the Holocaust and human rights in the ELA classroom. Her most recent publication, “Bearing Witness to Resistance and Resilience: Holocaust Literature in the ELA Classroom” was published by English Journal in November of 2024.She works closely with The Olga Lengyel Institute for Holocaust Studies and Human Rights (TOLI) both nationally and through regional programing in Michigan and Indiana.

What Are They Reading? Eighth Graders Give the Scoop on What They Recommend

At the beginning of every school year, I interview my new 8th grade honors students about what they like to read. Each year, there are enduring favorites mentioned, but it’s also interesting to me to see the trends in what genres middle grade readers are most interested in.

When I first moved from teaching high school to junior high twelve years ago, the top two favorites were fantasy (dragon books and vampires in particular) and realistic fiction that had to do with mental health and/or death (think Thirteen Reasons Why, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and anything by John Green).

This year, the genres were more varied than usual, but the number one book remains Percy Jackson and The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan. Our students read this book in 7th grade ELA, and many go on to read everything else Riordan has written. If you have not read the book, I’ll let my 8th graders tell you what it’s about and why they love it.

“It is a fantasy book. It is about a kid whose dad is a Greek god and he goes to a camp and goes on missions. He is healed by waters. I like that it has fighting. I also like that he meets more Greek gods on his quests.” (Lukas)

“The book is about a 12 year old kid who is dyslexic [and] finds out he is half-god and half-human and gets attacked by monsters when he isn’t with his step dad. He gets his mom taken by a monster and goes on a quest to find her but goes through many challenges then gets blamed for stealing Zeus’s lightning bolt and goes on another quest to find it and gets to see his Dad Poseidon for the first time. I liked how there was a lot of action in the book and it felt like you were really in the book by how the author wrote it.” (Cristopher)

“My favorite thing in the book is the ending of the book. It was not just a boring ending, it was a very creative ending and it’s still my favorite book to this day.” (Jameson)

Students go on to say they like the action and plot twists and that many of the Greek gods and mythical creatures are introduced throughout the book. They also loved the plot twists and cliffhangers at the end of chapters. Quite a few went on to say this was the first “real” book they ever finished.

Other genres students gave book recommendations in were widely varied.

In contemporary realistic fiction, students recommended books such as…

The Benefits of Being an Octopus by Ann Braden. “It’s about a teenage girl who has an abusive stepfather that struggles. I like this book because I like the connections she made with being like an octopus.”

Some Kind of Courage by Dan Gemeinhardt. “It is a western fiction. It’s about a boy who sets off to find his best friend, Sarah, a horse that was taken from him. I liked that book because it was very exciting and you never know what’s gonna happen next.”

The Star Outside My Windowamzn.to/3K85Izv by Onjali Q. Rauf. “It is realistic fiction adventure about this girl who goes on a journey to find a star that her mom said was for her. I liked how smoothly everything in the book flowed, and how advanced of a reading it was for me.”

Monster by Walter Dean Myers. “This book is about a 16 year old black male who is being accused of being an accomplice in a robbery. What I like about this book is that it is realistic and shows that there is a lot of messed up things happening in the real world.”

The One And Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate. “It’s not really ‘realistic’ fiction, but it’s fiction. It is about a gorilla that got taken away from his family. After he was taken away he got put into a cage to be shown, but we find out later he used to live in the owner’s home. But then he got too big and the owner started showing him, and the gorilla met some friends and started drawing. I’ve compared all other books to this one.”

I have many readers clamoring for romance in their fiction. Some they say they’ve enjoyed include:

The Summer I Turned Pretty by Jenny Han. “It is a good series based on a girl being in kind of a love triangle with her mom’s best friend’s sons. These books are an emotional plot twist! When reading the book it makes you just wanna yell at the characters for what they do, I like that about it cause it keeps you entertained and interested. This romance book is a very good one!”

If He Had Been With Me by Laura Nowlin. “I loved this book because of its amazing way of capturing evolving as young people in mature, scared, and developed teens. I also like how the book considers all types of point[s] of view, and gives a suspenseful feeling. It’s sad, but it gives great messages of how we, as people, can overcome and heal from our pain.”

The mystery, suspense, and horror genres are booming in recent years. Some books in these genres my 8th graders recommend are:

The Thief of Always by Clive Barker. “It’s about a 10 year old boy who gets lured into a place called the Holiday House where his wishes are granted, but the house is a trap to steal kids’ souls!”

A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson. “I really enjoyed reading the book and loved the twist. It’s about a couple who were killed and no one figured out who killed them, but Pip is going to find out.”

The Inheritance Games by Jennifer Lynn Barnes. “The story follows a girl named Avery Grambs who’s 17, homeless and trying to survive high school. Out of the blue she gets a letter requesting her presence at the reading of Tobias Hawthorne’s will, leaving her with 42 billion dollars. To figure out why a stranger left her money, she solves all sorts of riddles alongside his grandsons. The reason I liked this book so much is because of all the plot twists and shocks in this story. In general, it’s just a very fun read.”

Historical fiction is usually a recurring favorite as well. Students tend to encounter Alan Gratz books in 5th and/or 6th grade in our intermediate school ELA curriculum, so by the time they get to me, they have topics they love, but are hungry for even more. Some they recommend right now include:

Prisoner B-3087 by Alan Gratz. “It is about a boy and his family who hid during the Holocaust who was caught while scavenging for supplies. When he arrived he was treated poorly. When the war stopped the Nazis were planning on killing them.”

Hunt for the Bamboo Rat by Graham Salisbury. “It’s about a Japanese American who became a spy for the U.S. in World War II. I like how it feels like it can be actually true.”

And of course, students are very much still loving comics, graphic novels, and manga. Some favorites include anything by Raina Telegemeier, the Amulet books, and the Demon Slayer manga series.

I’m excited to circle back and conference with my students after a couple weeks of independent reading and journaling to find out what new titles and genres they have fallen in love with, and what they are looking to read next.

All of the books in my classroom library are either purchased by me or donated. The classroom wish list on Amazon is generated by student requests or recommendations. If you would like to donate a book to the library, you can click here.

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