Introduction

Being a student in today’s high school is the same as it ever was, but it is also completely unrecognizable. Two things can be true. The same novels and plays of decades past are still “covered” in paperless classrooms where students compose on keyboards or phones rather than (or along with) paper and pen. Some students walk school hallways to get to class while others opt for distance learning and may never step foot in a classroom again.

And yet across the physical and digital spaces of school and social media, students are getting quite a different education about our world, lessons not always acknowledged, but essential to understanding how we are shaped and can shape our world. In our junior and high school classrooms, how many of the textbooks and required novels feature contemporary youth’s lived experiences? Not many.

Just YA: Short Poems, Essays, & Fiction for Grades 7-12 is a collection of open licensed, non-revenue seeking literature about inclusive, affirming, justice-oriented ways of being and the incredible capacity of youth, intentionally curated for classrooms.

 Thematic

Just YA is organized in themes around identity, love, land, world, and futures (see Table 1.) that we see in conversation with the required canonical texts and youth interests. And the forms (poetry, essay, and narrative) are selected to inspire student writing, including creative fiction and nonfiction. Of course, we see all writing as creative, but literary analysis or text-dependent writing seems to dominate secondary writing curricula. We hope educators will use these youth-focused texts to update their curriculum and shift their conceptual unit framing to consider contemporary youth perspectives and how Just YA texts can inspire students to write their own poems, flash fiction, and essays.

In each section, there are multiple texts around the same topic to foster rich discussions in the classroom. Consider these text sets around which an entire unit could be developed. The texts are written by diverse adult authors, exploring themes related to geography, class, race, language, religion, gender, sexuality, and ability. Multilingual authors draw on their entire linguistic repertoire and appreciate poems, stories, and essays that celebrate linguistic diversity.

Table 1. Just YA Themes

Short

In my work in teacher education and professional development over the past decade, I found that teachers were spending a lot of time searching for short texts to study and enjoy with students. Go to any Facebook teacher group, and you will find teachers searching for a short story to teach theme or a poem to study symbolism. I love young adult anthologies and often enjoy them in my college young adult literature courses. I even had entire shelf of anthologies in my junior high classroom. And I drew on short fiction authors to help me teacher writing (e.g., leads, dialogue, and sensory language lessons). However, some anthology stories can ten or twenty pages, which is too long to read in a class period of 45 minutes. To understand theme or the evolution of a symbol in a text, readers have to read the whole story, which could take days.

Free

And then, of course, there is the concern of copyright infringement and funding. To purchase a class set of an anthology could cost hundreds of dollars out of a teacher’s pocket.  I am sure you have seen and contributed to teachers’ Amazon lists and Go Fund Me projects. Many teachers self-funding their classrooms, investing money year after year to keep up with new trends and publications. Thus, this project evolved out of a teacher-need for short texts that are for teens, beautifully written,  free, and with open licensing.

All the content is free to readers and available online, in PDF, or a paperback copy (which may incur a profit for the bookstore). While many books say “no part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission,” we ask that you do reproduce, store, share, copy, distribute any and all of it in the classroom and beyond! We want these in the hearts and hands of youth across the world. Authors have generously made them available to readers for free.

This collection is licensed as an Open Education Resource (OER) CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. This means that individual authors retain copyright of their work. You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license. If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material without permission from the author.

Youth-Centered

To develop this collection, we began by inviting young adult authors whose work we have shared in our own classrooms to contribute a short text to the anthology: Padma Venkatraman, Zetta Elliott, Jen Ferguson, Federico Erebia, and Chris Crowe among others. We reached out to well-known flash fiction and flash creative nonfiction writers from Brevity (e.g., Rajpreet Heir, Erin Murphy, Lee Martin) because flash fiction is not a form that has made it to young adult literature publishers yet (or not that we knew of). Finally, we invited teacher-poets to contribute short poems, essays, and fiction. Teachers are writers, too, and we feature many incredible educator-authors in this anthology such as Stacey Joy, Jennifer Guyor Jowett, Glenda Funk, and Tamara Belko (among others).

Inclusive & Affirming

Of all our authors, we asked that they craft inclusive stories that dispel stereotypes of youth and represent agentive youth characters so that our students can see themselves in the school literature curriculum. With an advisory board of young adult literature (YAL) scholars, secondary teachers, and secondary students, we’ve curated this collection to spark deep conversations in classrooms (and beyond) about the literary merit of short form literature with “universal” themes that center youth stories. The poems, essays, and fiction offered here and in paperback show the ways youth demand, enact, and deserve literature that shows them just, equitable, joyful lives. Together, the advisory board developed a framework for selecting texts. See Table 2. Our hope is that this criteria may support educators as they consider the youth representation in their curriculum and reading lives.

Support

In addition to the rich collection of poems, flash fiction, and essays, this anthology includes a valuable resource at the end called the “Teacher Guide.” This section offers a variety of lesson ideas and strategies designed to help educators integrate these texts into their classrooms effectively. The Teacher Guide aims to provide insights and support from my fifteen years of experience teaching secondary students with young adult literature. The goal is to enhance English language arts teaching practice with strategies that support literary comprehension, critical reading, and the enjoyment of literature, fostering a rich and engaging learning environment for all students.

In the Appendix  online is a table of the poems, essays, and fiction by title, author, form, and theme. You can search and sort this table to find the texts you are looking to shape your curriculum or for reading joy.

Table 2. Just YA text selection framework

Just YA Text Selection

This resource is no cost at https://open.library.okstate.edu/justya/