Presenting My Verse Novel Research at ChLA

This past week, I was in Columbus, Ohio where I presented my research on the verse novel for young readers at the 43rd Annual Children's Literature Association Conference. In lieu of my weekly review, I thought I would share my experience at the conference and some of the research that is informed by my interest and work with the verse novel for young readers (which I also explore on this blog).

Last summer I wrote an essay entitled "The Verse Novel for Young Readers: Collage, Confession, and Crisis in Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming" that was selected early this year as ChLA's PhD Level winner of the Graduate Student Essay Award; I was then able to present a portion of this essay during the conference on a panel called "Race in Children's Dreams, Fantasies, and Nightmares" with Ebony Elizabeth Thomas and Bevin Roue. (Both Roue and Thomas are doing fascinating work on race in children's literature. You can access Thomas's blog: The Dark Fantastic HERE.) My essay on Brown Girl Dreaming came out of the work I did on an early chapter in my dissertation project "The Collage Effect and Participatory Reading in Children's and Young Adult Literature." I reviewed Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming on this blog in mid-February.

If you are interested in my presentation, you can access the visual slides I used during my talk HERE. Several (amazing) ChLA attendees including Rebekah Fitzsimmons, Kate Slater, Pete Kunze, and Alysa Auriemma live tweeted the panel (a huge thank you to each of them!), summarizing my argument about Woodson's verse novel; I will include their notes below as well.

At the end of the presentation, several audience members posed great questions about the definition of the verse novel and its connection to collage, the depiction of the black body on various covers of verse novels, teaching the verse novel, and the ways in which other verse novelists such as Kwame Alexander's work might be related to Woodson's approach. I answered the question posed by Peter Kunze of how collage and participation are related by referencing my experiences teaching Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming in my course English 3830: Literature for the Intermediate Reader at Western Michigan University. Last semester was the third semester in a row that I have taught Brown Girl Dreaming. You can access my most recent course blog HERE where I detail my teaching approach to Woodson's verse novel HERE. Feel free to adapt my teaching materials to your own courses if you wish! I am also grateful for Gabrielle Halko's question about teaching the verse novel in the children's literature classroom. I had a great exchange about the depiction of race and the body in Kwame Alexander's The Crossover with Sarah Park Dahlen and Michelle Martin. I am grateful for the conversations I had with lots of great folks at ChLA this year! Later this week, I will resume my regularly scheduled reviewing of recently published verse novels for young readers. I am looking forward to reviewing Carole Boston Weatherford's You Can Fly: The Tuskegee Airmen and Marie Jaskulka's The Lost Marble Notebook of Forgotten Girl and Random Boy. 

Jacqueline Woodson's _Brown Girl Dreaming_

Published in 2014, Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming has been awarded the 2014 National Book Award for Young People, the 2015 Coretta Scott King Award, and was named a 2015 Newbery Honor Book. In the summer of 2015, Woodson was named the Young People's Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. On the Poetry Foundation's website, they note that this "title is given to a living writer in recognition of a career devoted to writing exceptional poetry for young readers. The laureate advises the Poetry Foundation on matters relating to young people’s literature and may engage in a variety of projects to help instill a lifelong love of poetry among the nation’s developing readers. This laureateship aims to promote poetry to children and their families, teachers, and librarians over the course of its two-year tenure." This week, I read Brown Girl Dreaming for the fifth time and taught it for the third semester in my Literature for the Intermediate Reader class at Western Michigan University. If you are interested in teaching Woodson's work, HERE is an activity that I use to open up my students' discussion of Brown Girl Dreaming. Each time I come to Woodson's work, I find something new, and it becomes a richer text for me.

The Plot: In Brown Girl Dreaming, Woodson traces the experiences of her first person speaker Jackie (who is the representation of Woodson's childhood self). The narrative begins at her birth and describes what life was like growing up during the civil rights era in both the North and the South. Jackie's parents separate when she is an infant, and she travels from Ohio with her mother and siblings to live with her maternal grandparents in South Carolina. Eventually, her mother moves the family to Brooklyn, New York. In addition to the examination of racism through the eyes of a young person, Woodson also tackles issues of the broken family, religion, death and illness, imprisonment, and her experience with a learning disability. Brown Girl Dreaming is divided into five sections: "i am born," "the stories of south carolina run like rivers," "followed the sky's mirrored constellation to freedom," "deep i my hear, i do believe," and "ready to change the world." The poetry within these sections is further framed by a rich paratext; Woodson includes a family tree, an epigraph from Langston Hughes's poem "Dreams," a scrapbook collection of family photos, and an author's note.

The Poetry: Brown Girl Dreaming is told primarily in lyrical free verse but is interspersed with a series of eleven haiku. No matter what form she employs, Woodson's poetry reflects a deep meditation upon the historical and personal roots that helped shape her speaker as a writer. For example, the second poem in the collection, "second daughter's second day on earth," begins with the language of Jackie's birth certificate. The first three lines of the poem read: “My birth certificate says: Female Negro / Mother: Mary Anne Irby, 22, Negro / Father: Jack Austin Woodson, 25, Negro” (3). The repetition of the final word in each line, “Negro,” emphasizes its significance as a marker, and these first three lines take on the feel of a collaged legal document within the poem. The poem mixes the left justified historical and documentary style narrative with stanzas rich in voice and lyric that are centered and italicized: "I am born brown-skinned, black-haired and wide-eyed / I am born Negro here and Colored there" (3). This poem goes on to reference Dr. King, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Ruby Bridges, and Rosa Parks as important figures who Jackie might model herself after as she grows up. This blending of personal and national history in the poem suggests Woodson’s desire to locate her story within and next to the stories of those individuals who profoundly transformed the world for brown children forever through their roles and their activism in the civil rights movement.

The Page: One theme that Woodson investigates in her memoir in verse is that of silence and blank space. Woodson has noted, “Memories don’t come back as straight narrative. They come in little bursts with white space all around them. It felt more realistic to write mine as poems.” The haiku series within Brown Girl Dreaming speaks volumes in its use of negative space. For example, the first haiku in the series, “how to listen #1” appears in part one of the verse novel entitled “i am born.” In the poem, memory, body, and emotion intertwine as a reflection of the early life of Jackie and her life in Columbus, Ohio with her mother, father, and siblings: “Somewhere in my brain / each laugh, tear and lullaby / becomes memory” (20). This poem encapsulates the drive of the entire collection—the focus of the narrative is remembering a history in order to gain insight into the self and understand the how personal and cultural history shapes an individual.

Brown Girl Dreaming is a gorgeous exploration of personal and national history. Woodson's use of lyricism, imagery, free verse, and haiku are distinct and moving. I give Brown Girl Dreaming five stars and highly recommend it.