Edited to add to the list. Gawk on the ones I forgot.
Because my upcoming middle grade novel, Hugging the Rock, is written in free verse I thought it only right to open poetry month with a list of verse novels for children and young adults. If I've missed one, please comment and let me know so I can add it to my master list. These are in order by title, not author, because that's the way my brain works.
A Bad Boy Can Be Good for a Girl by Tanya Lee Stone
A Dangerous Girl by Catherine Bateson
A Lion's Hunger: Poems of First Love by Ann Warren Turner
A Place Like This by Steven Herrick
After the Death of Anna Gonzales by Terri Fields
Aleutian Sparrow by Karen Hesse
Almost Forever by Maria Testa
Amber Was Brave, Essie Was Smart by Vera B. Williams
Angel Of Barbican High by Michelle A. Taylor
Autobiography Of Red: a novel in verse by Anne Carson
Becoming Joe DiMaggio by Maria Testa
Been To Yesterday: poems of a life by Lee Bennett Hopkins
Behind The Wheel by Janet S. Wong
Bird by Susan Hawthorne
Brimstone Journals by Ronald Koertge
Bronx Masquerade by Nikki Grimes
By The River by Steven Herrick
Crank by Ellen Hopkins
CrashBoomLove by Juan Felipe Herrara
Criss Cross by Lynne Rae Perkins
Dark Sons by Nikki Grimes
Do-Wrong Ron by Steven Herrick
Escaping Tornado Season: a story in poems by Julie Williams
Fearless Fernie by Gary Soto
Foreign Exchange: a mystery in poems by Mel Glenn
Frenchtown Summer by Robert Cormier
Geography of Girlhood by Kirsten Smith
Girl Coming in for a Landing by April Halprin Wayland
Girl_X recreated by Leanne Rowe
God Went to Beauty School by Cynthia Rylant
Hard Hit by Ann Turner
Heartbeat by Sharon Creech
Hold on Tight by Lorie Ann Grover
Hugging the Rock by Susan Taylor Brown
Jinx by Margaret Wild
Judy Scuppernong by Brenda Seabrooke
Jump Ball: a basketball season in poems by Mel Glenn
Keesha's House by Helen Frost
Laurie Tells by Linda Lowery
Learning To Swim: a memoir by Ann Turner
Locomotion by Jacqueline Woodson
Loose Threads by Lorie Ann Grover
Love Ghosts and Nose Hair by Steven Herrick
Love That Dog by Sharon Creech
Make Lemonade by Virginia Euwer Wolff
North Of Everything by Craig Crist-Evans
On Pointe: a novel by Lorie Ann Grover
One Night by Margaret Wild
One Of Those Hideous Books Where The Mother Dies by Sonya Sones
Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse
Poems From The Madhouse by Sandy Jeffs
Realm Of Possibility by David Levithan
Running Back to Ludie by Angela Johnson
Scout by Christine Ford
Secret of Me by Meg Kearney
Seventeen by Liz Rosenberg
Shakespeare Bats Cleanup by Ron Koertge
Simple Gift by Steven Herrick
Sister Slam and the Poetic Motormouth Roadtrip by Linda Oatman High
Soda Jerk by Cynthia Rylant
Something About America by Maria Testa
Soul Moon Soup by Lindsay Lee Johnson
Splintering by Eireann Corrigan
Split image:a story in poems by Mel Glenn
Stardust otel by Paul B. Janeczko
Stop Pretending: What Happened When my Big Sister Went Crazy by Sonya Sones
Taking of Room 114 by Mel Glenn
Talking In The Dark by Billy Merrell
The Spangled Drongo by Steven Herrick
The Way a Door Closes by Hope Anita Smith
The Year it All Happened by Catherine Bateson
Tom Jones Saves The World by Steven Herrick
True Believer by Virginia Euwer Wolff
Under The Pear Tree by Brenda Seabrooke
Volcano Boy:a novel in verse by Libby Hathorn
Voyage of the Arctic Tern by Hugh Montgomery
What My Mother Doesn't Know by Sonya Sones
Whitechurch by Chris Lynch
Who Killed Mr. Chippendale?: A Mystery in Poems by Mel Glenn
Who Will Tell My Brother? by Marlene Carvell
Witness by Karen Hesse
Worlds Afire by Paul B. Janeczko
You Remind Me Of You by Eireann Corrigan
Edited on Sunday to update the list
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Things to Do
Quotes
"We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little." Anne Lamott
"Love the writing, love the writing, love the writing...the rest will follow."Jane Yolen
"The whole thing is, you’ve got to make them care about somebody." Frank Capra
"As writers, we must be willing to feel our sadness, our anger, our terror, so we can reach in and find our sweet vulnerability that is just sitting there waiting for us to come back home." Nancy Slonim Aronie
"Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they're yours!" Richard Bach
"Yet somehow, we write; and most of the time, we like what we write. The dark place seems less dark when we get there. It was only the journey that was fearful." Susan Shaughnessy
"You must want to enough. Enough to take all the rejections, enough to pay the price of disappointment and discouragement while you are learning. Like any other artist you must learn your craft -- then you can add all the genius you like." Phyllis A. Whitney
"Writers write about what obsesses them. You draw those cards. I lost my mother when I was 14. My daughter died at the age of 6. I lost my faith as a Catholic. When I'm writing, the darkness is always there. I go where the pain is." Anne Rice
"I write in terror. I have to talk myself into bravery with every sentence, sometimes every syllable." Cynthia Ozick
"There have been societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories." Ursula K. LeGuin
"Your first job is to get your own story straight." Natalie Goldberg
"Only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking." Naomi Wolf
"Few children learn to read books by themselves. Someone has to lure them into the wonderful world of the written word; someone has to show them the way." Orville Prescott
"A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults." Ursula K. LeGuin
"I'd always thought you had to be a special person to write. And then I realized you just have to start." Abigail Thomas
"You will recognize your own path when you come upon it, because you will suddenly have all the energy and imagination you will ever need." Jerry Gillies
"But they’re not telling the truth if they don’t teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer." Doris Lessing
"A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote."Yevgeny Yentushenko
"And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the
greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't
believe in magic will never find it." Roald Dahl
"I compose sometimes with a pen and notebook, sometimes on the computer; it makes no difference. If all I had was a chisel and a rock I would write on the rock." Ursula Le Guin
"If you want to write from a place of emotional integrity, it is important to learn everything you can about all kinds of emotions, including those that exist in you, that you wish didn't." Elizabeth Berg
"And this is the way a novel gets written, in ignorance, fear, sorrow, madness, and a kind of psychotic happiness as an incubator for the wonders being born." Jack Kerouac
"Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing. They are the ones who discover what is most important and strangest and most pleasurable in themselves, and keep believing in the value of their work, despite the difficulties." Bonnie Friedman
Who am I?I was born on the Cancer/Leo cusp and share a birthday with Ernest Hemingway and Robin Williams. The similarities don't stop there as I can go from depressed to ecstatic without ever passing go. I feel scared most of the time though my friends call me brave and I find it easier to believe in my friends than to believe in my own abilities to make what I want out of my life.
Who am I? A wife, a mother, a daughter, and even, gulp, a grandmother.
Who am I? A writer who never gets tired of playing with words, even when the words are hard to find. A writer of books for children and articles for grown-ups and many things in-between.
Who am I? A motivational speaker, writing instructor, workshop leader and full-time follower of dreams.
Who am I? Read and find out.
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carriep63
Comments
I keep trying to read adult books and I keep giving up. They just don't speak to me the way I need a book to.
I don't remember Birdland by Tracy Mack as a verse novel. I don't have it to check (I loaned it out and it never came back!). She's a very poetic writer, but I think that one's in prose.
I read a poem every day to limber up my brain, keep my thoughts supple, freshen my imagery. Better exercise is to write a poem every day, even a bad one. FOr a writer, poetry builds mind muscles.
Brenda Seabrooke
I appreciate your list. I've had the pleasure of having read more than two-thirds of these thus far. My own free verse novel, BEANBALL, is scheduled for 2/18/08 release by Clarion.
Gene Fehler
Glass by Ellen Hopkins
Impulse by Ellen Hopkins
I Don't Want to be Crazy by Samantha Schutz
What My Girlfriend Doesn't Know by Sonya Sones
Some of my favourite verse novelists (but so many I haven't tried yet): Steven Herrick; Sharon Creech; Margaret Wild; Karen Hesse.
You might like to cast your eye down this list from Ed. Dept. W. Australia, for a few more :
http://amlib.eddept.wa.edu.au/webqu
Thanks and best wishes! Lynlibrary
It is so very helpful.
- an MFA grad student in NC