JEF - Poetry - Novels in Verse

Curvaceous sixteen-year-old Xiomara Batista discovers slam poetry as a way to understand her fiercely religious mother's view of women, as well as her relationship to a world dominated by rape-culture.

Fourteen-year-old twin basketball stars Josh and Jordan wrestle with highs and lows on and off the court as their father ignores his declining health.

In the summer of 1988, twelve-year-old Chuck Bell is sent to stay with his grandparents, where he discovers jazz and basketball and learns more about his family's past.

"Sixteen-year-old Alicia Rivers has a reputation that precedes her. But there's more to her story than the whispers that follow her throughout the hallways at school-whispers that splinter into a million different insults that really mean: a girl who has had sex. But what her classmates don't know is that Alicia was sexually abused by a popular teacher, and that trauma has rewritten every cell in her body into someone she doesn't recognize. To the...

Crank. Glass. Ice. Crystal. Whatever you call it, it's all the same: a monster. And once it's got hold of you, this monster will never let you go. Now with a baby to care for, Kristina is determined to be the one deciding when and how much, the one calling the shots. But the monster is too strong and, before she knows it, Kristina is back in its grips. She needs the monster to keep going, to face the pressures of day-to-day life. She will do anything...

"Six eighth graders outside Washington, DC, navigate through conflict and division focused on their school district's Native American mascot"--Provided by publisher. Six eighth graders in Washington, DC, navigate through the conflict and division sparked by a school assignment focused on their town's Native American mascot.

In the room beneath a theater stage, the ghosts of Juliet, Ophelia, Cordelia, and other teenage girls who died tragically in Shakespeare's plays, share their experiences and trauma and get the chance to retell the stories of their lives in their own terms.

The day nine-year-old Grace is called to work in the kitchen in the Big House, everyone warns her to to keep her head down and her thoughts to herself, but the more she sees of the oppressive Master and his hateful wife, the more she questions things until one day her thoughts escape--and to avoid being separated she and her family flee into the Dismal Swamp, to join the other escaped slaves who live there.

Picked on at home, criticized for talking trash while beating boys at basketball, and always seen as less than her best friend, a girl struggles to like and accept herself.