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. 