Meet our Contributor: Dr. Melanie Hundley
| Dr. Melanie Hundley is a Professor in the Practice of English Education at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College; her research examines how AI, digital and multimodal composition informs the development of pre-service teachers’ writing pedagogy. Additionally, she explores the use of AI, digital and social media in young adult literature. She teaches writing methods courses that focus on AI, digital and multimodal composition and young adult literature courses that explore diversity, culture, and storytelling in young adult texts. |  |
She teaches AI and literacy courses including AI and Storytelling. Her current research focus has three strands: AI in writing, AI in Teacher Education, and Verse Novels in Young Adult Literature She is currently the Coordinator of the Secondary Education English Education program in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College.
YA Verse Novels: Marching to Their Own Beat by Dr. Melanie Hundley
| Some writing projects flow so effortlessly from the pen that they seem to arrive fully formed. Others arrive more slowly and take much more time to find their flow and rhythm. My chapter, The Young Adult Verse Novel: Marching to Its Own Beat, in The Oxford Handbook of Young Adult Literature was definitely the second kind. The idea for the chapter started with the simple question: How did the YA verse novel become such a powerful form for telling adolescent stories? The more I read, the more I realized I wasn't tracing the history of a genre; I was listening for its rhythm. |  |
Poetry, for me, has always been about more than beautiful language. It creates movement. It asks us to slow down, speed up, linger over a line, hear the repetition of a sound, notice the silence created by white space. Poets play with language. They make it dance. They stretch it, compress it, rearrange it, and sometimes break it apart so readers can discover something new in the pieces. Form isn't decoration; it's part of the meaning. Sometimes they follow the beat. Sometimes they deliberately disrupt it.
That playfulness became one of the threads that pulled me through this chapter. As I looked back across the history of the YA verse novel, I found myself thinking less about chronology and more about movement and musicality, about rhythm and rebellion. Genres, like music, develop through variations on familiar themes. Writers listen to those who came before them, borrow techniques, improvise, challenge expectations, and create something entirely new. Sometimes they follow the beat. Sometimes they deliberately disrupt it. Poets have been doing this for a very long time. YA verse novelists have been doing it in their work for as long as there have been YA verse novels.
The Beat poets fascinated me for this reason. Their poetry rebelled against traditional structures, embraced vernacular language, experimented with rhythm, and insisted that ordinary lives and difficult social issues belonged in poetry. They played with repetition, juxtaposition, syntax, sound, and the rhythms of jazz. Their rebellion wasn't just about what they wrote; it was embedded in how they wrote. Their work reminds us that experimentation is never experimentation for its own sake. Form and function work together. The rhythms of the poems mirror the rhythms of lived experience. This is what I saw in young adult verse novels. That spirit of rebellion echoes throughout the YA verse novel.
This distinction was important to me. So much of how I was taught poetry in school suggested that poetry was sacred and elevated—something to be admired from a distance rather than something I was capable of creating as a young writer. Poetry belonged to accomplished poets. My job was to study it, appreciate it, figure out what it meant, and perhaps dream of writing it myself somewhere in the future.
That playfulness became one of the threads that pulled me through this chapter. As I looked back across the history of the YA verse novel, I found myself thinking less about chronology and more about movement and musicality, about rhythm and rebellion. Genres, like music, develop through variations on familiar themes. Writers listen to those who came before them, borrow techniques, improvise, challenge expectations, and create something entirely new. Sometimes they follow the beat. Sometimes they deliberately disrupt it. Poets have been doing this for a very long time. YA verse novelists have been doing it in their work for as long as there have been YA verse novels.
The Beat poets fascinated me for this reason. Their poetry rebelled against traditional structures, embraced vernacular language, experimented with rhythm, and insisted that ordinary lives and difficult social issues belonged in poetry. They played with repetition, juxtaposition, syntax, sound, and the rhythms of jazz. Their rebellion wasn't just about what they wrote; it was embedded in how they wrote. Their work reminds us that experimentation is never experimentation for its own sake. Form and function work together. The rhythms of the poems mirror the rhythms of lived experience. This is what I saw in young adult verse novels. That spirit of rebellion echoes throughout the YA verse novel.
This distinction was important to me. So much of how I was taught poetry in school suggested that poetry was sacred and elevated—something to be admired from a distance rather than something I was capable of creating as a young writer. Poetry belonged to accomplished poets. My job was to study it, appreciate it, figure out what it meant, and perhaps dream of writing it myself somewhere in the future.
YA Verse Novels Keeps Poetry Alive
But that wasn’t the poetry the Beat poets created, and it wasn’t the poetry I kept encountering in young adult verse novels. This poetry felt alive. It played with language and form. It broke rules. It used the language of everyday life and made that language worthy of poetry. More importantly, the breaking of rules often did something. Form and function worked together.
The rhythms of these poems can mirror the rhythms of lived experience. A poem can feel breathless or hesitant, controlled or chaotic. Language can tumble forward, trip over itself, circle back, or make us stop completely. White space can become a pause, a silence, or something a character cannot say. Repetition can create a beat or make a thought feel inescapable. A line can break in an unexpected place and change how we hear what comes next. A poet can break a rule because breaking the rule communicates something that following it cannot.
That idea of poetry feels especially important in literature written for young people. Rather than asking adolescent readers to stand at a respectful distance and admire poetry, the YA verse novel invites them inside it. It asks them to listen, notice, interpret, and sometimes fill the spaces the writer deliberately leaves open. And perhaps it also offers young readers and writers something I wish I had understood much earlier: poetry isn't something you have to wait for permission to make. You can play with it. You can push against it. You can make it sound like the world you actually inhabit.
The rhythms of these poems can mirror the rhythms of lived experience. A poem can feel breathless or hesitant, controlled or chaotic. Language can tumble forward, trip over itself, circle back, or make us stop completely. White space can become a pause, a silence, or something a character cannot say. Repetition can create a beat or make a thought feel inescapable. A line can break in an unexpected place and change how we hear what comes next. A poet can break a rule because breaking the rule communicates something that following it cannot.
That idea of poetry feels especially important in literature written for young people. Rather than asking adolescent readers to stand at a respectful distance and admire poetry, the YA verse novel invites them inside it. It asks them to listen, notice, interpret, and sometimes fill the spaces the writer deliberately leaves open. And perhaps it also offers young readers and writers something I wish I had understood much earlier: poetry isn't something you have to wait for permission to make. You can play with it. You can push against it. You can make it sound like the world you actually inhabit.
The YA Verse Novel as a Hybrid
That idea of poetry feels especially important in literature written for young people. Rather than asking adolescent readers to stand at a respectful distance and admire poetry, the YA verse novel invites them inside it. It asks them to listen, notice, interpret, and sometimes fill the spaces the writer deliberately leaves open. And perhaps it also offers young readers and writers something I wish I had understood much earlier: poetry isn't something you have to wait for permission to make. You can play with it. You can push against it. You can make it sound like the world you actually inhabit.
Perhaps that shouldn't be surprising. The YA verse novel is itself a hybrid. It borrows from poetry and prose and sometimes drama and visual art. It tells a sustained narrative, but it does so through poems. It gives us characters and plots while asking us to pay attention to line, rhythm, image, sound, shape, and silence. It occupies an in-between space.
So does its primary audience. Adolescence is also an in-between space—not childhood, not quite adulthood, but a period of becoming. Adolescents experiment with language, identity, relationships, boundaries, and expectations. They question rules. They try on voices. They push against categories other people have created for them. There is something wonderfully appropriate, then, about telling adolescent stories through a literary form that also refuses to stay neatly inside its assigned boundaries.
As I worked on the chapter, I began to see that history as a series of waves, each building on the one before it while finding its own rhythm. Like musicians riffing on an earlier melody, authors borrow techniques, challenge conventions, and expand the possibilities of what the form can do. The result is a genre that continues to evolve while remaining unmistakably connected to its roots. In the first wave, writers such as Arnold Adoff and Mel Glenn helped establish the instrumentation: adolescent voices, vernacular language, experimentation with poetic forms, and stories centered on concerns relevant to young people. The second wave increased the complexity of both the poetry and the storytelling while pushing more deeply into difficult social issues. And the third wave has built on those possibilities, exploding whose stories are represented, experimenting even further with form, and exploring identities and social issues in increasingly complex cultural and historical contexts.
Each wave listens to what came before it and then changes the sound.
Perhaps that shouldn't be surprising. The YA verse novel is itself a hybrid. It borrows from poetry and prose and sometimes drama and visual art. It tells a sustained narrative, but it does so through poems. It gives us characters and plots while asking us to pay attention to line, rhythm, image, sound, shape, and silence. It occupies an in-between space.
So does its primary audience. Adolescence is also an in-between space—not childhood, not quite adulthood, but a period of becoming. Adolescents experiment with language, identity, relationships, boundaries, and expectations. They question rules. They try on voices. They push against categories other people have created for them. There is something wonderfully appropriate, then, about telling adolescent stories through a literary form that also refuses to stay neatly inside its assigned boundaries.
As I worked on the chapter, I began to see that history as a series of waves, each building on the one before it while finding its own rhythm. Like musicians riffing on an earlier melody, authors borrow techniques, challenge conventions, and expand the possibilities of what the form can do. The result is a genre that continues to evolve while remaining unmistakably connected to its roots. In the first wave, writers such as Arnold Adoff and Mel Glenn helped establish the instrumentation: adolescent voices, vernacular language, experimentation with poetic forms, and stories centered on concerns relevant to young people. The second wave increased the complexity of both the poetry and the storytelling while pushing more deeply into difficult social issues. And the third wave has built on those possibilities, exploding whose stories are represented, experimenting even further with form, and exploring identities and social issues in increasingly complex cultural and historical contexts.
Each wave listens to what came before it and then changes the sound.
Ellen Hopkins's Crank
One of the central arguments I make in the chapter is that Ellen Hopkins's Crank trilogy represents a pivotal moment in the evolution of the genre. Hopkins didn't simply tell difficult stories in verse. She used line breaks, white space, visual design, repetition, and typography to deepen characterization and invite readers into the emotional experience of addiction. The poems don't just tell Kristina's story; they embody it. At times the words split apart on the page. At others they form shapes or create separate pathways through a poem. White space becomes part of what we read. The page itself becomes part of the narrative.
That realization changed the way I think about verse novels. It's easy to describe them as stories told in poems. The best verse novels couldn't simply be converted into prose without losing something essential. Their rhythms create pacing. Repetition creates patterns and connections. Line breaks create hesitation or momentum. Visual structures create tension. White space creates silence. And those silences ask readers to participate, to make connections and sometimes to fill in what isn't said. Their silences invite readers to participate in making meaning. Poetry gives narrative another dimension because we aren't only following what happens. We are experiencing how it happens.
That is where musicality becomes especially important. Music isn't simply a sequence of notes, just as a story isn't simply a sequence of events. Rhythm, tempo, repetition, variation, pause, and silence shape how we experience both. Verse novelists have all of those tools available to them. A poem can race across a page and then suddenly stop. A word can return like a refrain. The arrangement of language can suggest movement before we have fully processed what the words themselves mean.
That realization changed the way I think about verse novels. It's easy to describe them as stories told in poems. The best verse novels couldn't simply be converted into prose without losing something essential. Their rhythms create pacing. Repetition creates patterns and connections. Line breaks create hesitation or momentum. Visual structures create tension. White space creates silence. And those silences ask readers to participate, to make connections and sometimes to fill in what isn't said. Their silences invite readers to participate in making meaning. Poetry gives narrative another dimension because we aren't only following what happens. We are experiencing how it happens.
That is where musicality becomes especially important. Music isn't simply a sequence of notes, just as a story isn't simply a sequence of events. Rhythm, tempo, repetition, variation, pause, and silence shape how we experience both. Verse novelists have all of those tools available to them. A poem can race across a page and then suddenly stop. A word can return like a refrain. The arrangement of language can suggest movement before we have fully processed what the words themselves mean.
Kwame Alexander's The Crossover
Later verse novelists build on and extend these possibilities. In The Crossover, for example, Kwame Alexander uses typography, rhythm, repetition, white space, and the language of basketball to make movement visible on the page. We don't simply read that Josh Bell is dribbling a basketball; the language moves. The poem has a beat. The words speed up, shift, stretch, and fall across the page. Poetry allows the narrative to perform the action it describes.
That is part of what I find so compelling about the form. Like musicians riffing on an earlier melody, YA verse novelists listen to what other writers have done and then create their own variations. The result is a genre that continues to evolve while remaining connected to its roots. Today's verse novels tell stories about family, grief, racism, immigration, identity, violence, body image, belonging, ordinary life, and extraordinary circumstances. They cross genres and forms. But again and again, writers return to the possibilities created when poetry and narrative meet.
That is part of what I find so compelling about the form. Like musicians riffing on an earlier melody, YA verse novelists listen to what other writers have done and then create their own variations. The result is a genre that continues to evolve while remaining connected to its roots. Today's verse novels tell stories about family, grief, racism, immigration, identity, violence, body image, belonging, ordinary life, and extraordinary circumstances. They cross genres and forms. But again and again, writers return to the possibilities created when poetry and narrative meet.
Drafting The Chapter for The Oxford Handbook of Young Adult Literature
Of course, this particular chapter didn't find its rhythm overnight. It went through more revisions than I care to count, and I am deeply grateful to Vic and Crag, the editors of The Oxford Handbook of Young Adult Literature. They asked hard questions, encouraged me to keep pushing my thinking, and patiently guided the chapter through countless rewrites. Their thoughtful feedback challenged me to clarify my ideas and strengthened the final version. Scholarship is always a conversation, and I am thankful they were such generous conversation partners—even when that conversation sent me back for yet another revision.
Somewhere in all those revisions, I stopped trying simply to define the YA verse novel and started listening more carefully to what it was doing. I hope readers of the chapter do the same. I hope they come away with a deeper appreciation not only for the history of YA verse novels but also for what poetry contributes to storytelling. Poetry asks us to hear language differently. It invites us to notice rhythm, repetition, silence, visual space, and the possibilities created when writers deliberately break patterns and expectations. It reminds us that stories aren't simply told through plot. They are experienced through voice, sound, movement, form, and sometimes through the spaces between words.
Perhaps that's why the YA verse novel continues to resonate so powerfully with adolescent readers. Like adolescence itself, it resists easy definitions. It occupies spaces between established categories. It experiments. It plays. It questions. It pushes against expectations. It rebels.
And through all of that, it continues to march to its own beat.
Somewhere in all those revisions, I stopped trying simply to define the YA verse novel and started listening more carefully to what it was doing. I hope readers of the chapter do the same. I hope they come away with a deeper appreciation not only for the history of YA verse novels but also for what poetry contributes to storytelling. Poetry asks us to hear language differently. It invites us to notice rhythm, repetition, silence, visual space, and the possibilities created when writers deliberately break patterns and expectations. It reminds us that stories aren't simply told through plot. They are experienced through voice, sound, movement, form, and sometimes through the spaces between words.
Perhaps that's why the YA verse novel continues to resonate so powerfully with adolescent readers. Like adolescence itself, it resists easy definitions. It occupies spaces between established categories. It experiments. It plays. It questions. It pushes against expectations. It rebels.
And through all of that, it continues to march to its own beat.
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