Verse Novels as Mentor Texts, How It Started for Me

Meet our Contributor

Dr. Melanie K. Hundley is a Professor in the Practice of Literacy Education and the Associate Chair of the Department of Teaching and Learning. Her scholarship centers on digital and multimodal writing, artificial intelligence, and teacher education, with a particular focus on how novice English teachers engage with and implement these evolving literacies in their pedagogy. She examines the intersection of writing instruction, digital technologies, and multimodal composing, exploring how these elements shape both student learning and teacher preparation. Her work highlights the ways in which artificial intelligence and emerging technologies influence composition, fostering critical engagement with digital tools while supporting students' and teachers’ compositing practices. Through her research, she advocates for instructional approaches that leverage AI, multimodal texts, and contemporary young adult literature to enhance student engagement, provide multiple scaffolding opportunities, and develop disciplinary literacy skills. Dr. Hundley’s scholarship appears in leading publications on digital and multimodal composing, writing pedagogy, and teacher education. She is a contributing author to Revolutionizing English Education: The Power of AI in the Classroom, Innovating Pedagogy 2024: Open University Innovation Report 12, and Participatory Literacy in P-12 Classrooms in the Digital Age. Her research on writing instruction and AI has been published in Computers & Composition, Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, and Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, among other venues. Her forthcoming work continues to explore the ethical and pedagogical implications of generative AI in multimodal composition and teacher preparation.

Verse Novels as Mentor Texts, How It Started for Me

​by Melanie Hundley

It’s no secret that I have a deep and abiding love for verse novels. There is something magical in the way a story gets constructed across a series of poems.  I am struck by the interplay of language, literary elements, and visual space.  I appreciate the lyrical and visual punch of Kwame Alexander’s The Crossover and the melodic flow and character development of Ann E. Burg’s Flooded.  I like the history built into Chris Crowe’s Death Coming Up the Hill and Melanie Crowder’s Audacity. I adore how Sharon Creech’s Love that Dog and Hate that Cat play with our expectations of poems we were taught and how Caroline Brooks DuBois’s Ode to a Nobody is a love letter to English class and writing. I am lost in magic that is Joy McCollough’s Enter the Body—that book, those characters pulled from Shakespeare, those poems.  Ahh, I could lose myself in other people’s lines and happily while away hours.

​However, I am working with these books for a reason; I am  in my office pulling verse novels from my shelves for a project that I am doing with my students.  I’ve just pulled Who Killed Mr. Chippendale? by Mel Glenn from my shelves and I am struck by the journey this book and I have taken.  This verse novel, published in 1996, was one of the first verse novels I ever used with students. I still remember conversations with students about how poems didn’t have to rhyme and how they could be linked together to tell a story.   I still use poems from Who Killed Mr. Chippendale? as mentor texts for writers. My English major students sometimes overlook this book; it isn’t as lyrical or as visually stunning as other verse novels. It is deceptively simple—a murder mystery told in verse.  If we set aside how it manipulates the mystery genre, building up and releasing tension differently than a prose text would.  If we ignore how the plot builds over poems from individual students who knew or interacted with the murdered teacher, if we ignore how the clues are hidden and not hidden in the poems, if we ignore all of that, we still have a book that engages readers with a story that seems oddly current.  The language is dated (it is nearly 30 years old) and simple, but it still grabs readers.  Contemporary verse novels are more complex, often more poetic, and perhaps more stylistic but there is still something compelling about this text and these poems.

Each poem provides a character’s thoughts and ideas.  The poem “Kesha Templeton” shows the readers Kesha’s view of the school day.  She does not focus on the death of the teacher, but rather the aftermath. One of my former 7th grade students said, “Kesha doesn’t talk about the teacher. She talks about the murder. I don’t know if she knew him but I know she is scared.”  This student connected with this poem and was able to talk about what he thought and provide evidence from the poem to back up his ideas.  

Keesha Templeton

Around here, it’s been murder,
Literally.
Vocabulary exercise of the day, guys.
How many words do we know?
       Period 1: manslaughter
       Period 2: homicide
       Period 3: slaying
       Period 4: assassination
       Period 5: massacre
       Period 6: ethnic cleansing
       Period 7: annihilation
       Period 8: genocide
Hey, this school is scary.
At the end of the year I’m transferrin’.
I’m just dying to get out (p. 21).

As a poem, Keesha Templeton, plays with the definitions of literally and figuratively.  She opens with “Around here, it’s been murder,/Literally.”  She uses the word murder to both talk about the actual murder that happened and to describe how hard it has been at the school.  She then finishes the poem with a return to the figurative use of the word dying to describe how anxious she is about being a student in the school. This interaction with literal and figurative meanings of words may seem simple but, as readers, we are aware of how these concepts are introduced as part of high school English classes.  This push/pull on literal and figurative language emphasizes Keesha’s role as student and introduces her as a student who has paid attention and has internalized this learning.  Opening and closing with murder and dying show that she has also internalized the alarm that comes from being in a location where violence has happened.

Keesha’s word play continues with a description of her classes. She names each class after a form of murder rather than the name of the actual class. Her description ends with Period 8: genocide.  This list shows Keesha’s fear and uncertainty.  She uses the naming of different forms of murder as a tool to separate herself from the fear she feels while also using the increasing severity of the words to explore the rising anxiety she feels.  She also implies that school does not feel safe for her. As readers, we see the increasing violence embedded in the words and realize the depth of her anxiety.  The seeming simplicity of the list emphasizes the increasing apprehension the student has in the aftermath of her teacher’s murder.  This poem, in its simplicity, identifies the stark reality of violence in schools and the aftermath of that violence.

​The poem provides a strong template for students to think deeply about issues. I first used this poem with seventh graders in the mid-nineties. There were a series of new rules that had been implemented after a fight in the lunchroom, and the students were upset. They felt the rules were being enforced harshly with a zero tolerance policy for kids being kids. Three students wrote:

Bennett, Kelly, Kara

Around here, it’s been strict,
Literally.
Vocabulary exercise of the day, Rams.
How many words do we know?
     Period 1: stern
     Period 2: firm
     Period 3: harsh
     Period 4: rigid
     Period 5: severe
     Period 6: uncompromising
     Period 7: austere
     Period 8: authoritarian
Hey, big fights are scary.
At the end of the day, you are being too controlling.
We have to have room to grow.

​This poems structure allowed them to map their feelings. In choosing the order for the vocabulary words, they had to argue for the meaning and focus on nuance.  During Covid, a student explored how she felt during a writing exercise, explaining,

Laney

​Around here, it’s been sick,
Literally.
Vocabulary exercise of the day, Patriots.
How many words do we know?
     Period 1: illness
     Period 2: sickness
     Period 3: flu
     Period 4: respiratory disease
     Period 5: contagion
     Period 6: virus
Period 7: epidemic
Period 8: pandemic
Hey, this Covid-19 is scary.
At the end of the year I’m getting vaccinated.
I’m just too young to get sick.

What these lines show is a student exploring the worries and concerns about an illness that we knew little about.  What she did know from what was on the news and social media was scary to her.  The pattern let her build vocabulary from the term “illness” to “pandemic” with each iteration of the vocabulary increasing the level of complexity and fear. This seemingly simple format allowed her to explore concerns she had in a form that felt more comfortable to her.  Laney explained in her author’s statement, “I made a picture with words to show how what I meant.”  Avery, a high school student, expressed his feelings about the protests and counterprotests he was seeing around him.

Avery

Around here, it’s been killer,
Literally.
Vocabulary exercise of the day, Racism.
How many words do we know?
     Period 1: Tamir Rice, 14
     Period 2: Michael Brown, 15
     Period 3: Jordan Edwards, 26
     Period 4: Stephon Clark, 22
     Period 5: Botham Jean, 26
     Period 6: Breonna Taylor, 26
     Period 7: Dante Wright, 20
     Period 8: George Floyd, 46
Hey, this being black is scary.
At the end of the day, I’m choked up and
I’m just trying to keep breathing.

Like Kesha, Avery focused on loss and death. Rather than rename his vocabulary word—racism—he chose to list the names and ages of black people who had been killed. Some of the names were names that were in the news and others were not.  Students in the class with Avery looked up the names; the poem became a lesson in the results of racism. In giving the names, it personalized the term in ways that renaming would not.

Mel Glenn’s verse novel is dated, and the poetic structures don’t have the complexity of some of the poem structures we teach (sonnets, villanelles, haiku, etc.) but there is still opportunity in these structures.  Part of their strength is their approachability.  That is part of the magic of young adult verse novels—their amazing storytelling that pulls the reader in and makes the poems and poetic structures more approachable. Contemporary verse novels are dynamic and so poetic complex.  I am astounded by the narrative complexity of the heroic crown cycle in Marilyn Nelson’s A Wreath for Emmett Till and amazed by the different poetic structures used in Lesleah Newman’s October Mourning. I can get lost in the incredible beauty of Jacqueline Woodson’s Locomotion or Brown Girl Dreaming or slide into the textures of the poems in Elizabeth Acevedo’s Clap When You Land or The Poet X. I still remember the first verse novels I read.  The early novels of Mel Glenn that I read as a high school student and then early career teacher inspired me to write but, more importantly, they inspired my students to write.  So when I pick up Jasmine Warga’s beautiful Other Words for Home or the touching Chlorine Sky by Mahogany Brown or the painful We Are the Ashes, We Are the Fire by Joy McCollough, I know that I am picking up texts that are more than stories that will reach my students, I am picking up texts that will inspire my students to think and to write.