Eight years ago, poet Nicole Sealey started The Sealey Challenge, which asks participants to read 31 books during the 31 days of August. Since the Sealey Challenge is for all ages, we’re offering a reading list of 31 poetry books for K-12 students: from picture books to novels-in-verse to books and chapbooks by individual poets. Peruse this list for inspiration (no need to read all these books or read them in order) and come on down to the Poetry Center to enjoy them—they’re all available in our library! When you’re done, you can download a Challenge certificate and request a gold seal.
If you can’t read 31 books in 31 days? No worries! This isn’t about being perfect, it’s about reading—and celebrating—poetry. And, of course, this list doesn’t include everything you might want to read: there are many amazing poetry books for K-12 students out there.
A note on grade-level: We’ve separated books roughly by elementary school, middle school, and high school grade levels. Of course, reading abilities and interests vary greatly, so our grade-level categories should be taken with a grain of salt. We also encourage everyone to embrace reading books that may fall below your “grade-level”: even as adults, we love reading picture books and middle-grade/YA novels-in-verse!
-The UA Poetry Center’s K-12 Education Team
Elementary School & Above:
Picture Books:
1. A is for Activist, written and illustrated by Innosanto Nagara: In this abcedarian poem, the letters stand for concepts, things, and groups that have been integral to movements for social change, from co-ops to May Day to the Zapatistas. The colorful, mural-like illustrations evoke stencils and collage, introducing pre- and new readers to protest culture in a fun, inspiring way.
2. Black Girl Magic: A Poem by Mahogany L. Brown, art by Jess X. Snow: This illustrated poem pushes back against things Black girls are too often told they can’t do by society, and celebrates both the many brilliant and powerful Black women in our world and the path from Black girlhood to womanhood. Snow’s illustrations are pared down and powerful: glinting stars show up in hair, shadows, and dancing figures.
3. Inheritance: A Visual Poem by Elizabeth Acevedo, art by Andrea Pippins: Pippin’s full color illustrations bring Acevedo’s famous poem—which grapples with complexities and beauty of Black hair and Afro-Latinidad—to life on the page in vibrant reds, oranges, browns, and greens.
4. Jabberwalking by Juan Felipe Herrera: This playful and hard-to-categorize book by the former U.S. Poet Laureate and noted children’s author encourages young readers to take inspiration from the world around them and create their own fun, wild, and heartfelt poetry.
5. Remember by Joy Harjo, art by Michaela Goade: This beautifully illustrated rendition of Harjo’s poem “Remember” urges readers to think about how they’re connected to each other, the ecosystem, and the universe. Both authors are Indigenous and the book is inspired by their cultures: Harjo’s text echoes the Mvskoke song tradition, while Goade’s illustrations draw on Tlingit cosmology, land, and formline design.
Anthologies & Collections:
6. 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East by Naomi Shihab Nye: This book collects Nye’s poems about living in, traveling around, and loving the Middle East, with a particular focus on Palestine, where her father’s family is from.
7. I’m Wild I Sing, UA Poetry Center: This 2024 anthology from the UA Poetry Center’s Writing the Community program features work by elementary school poets, alongside an intergenerational residency based in one of Tucson’s oldest neighborhoods, Barrio Kroeger Lane.
Middle School & Above:
Novels-in-Verse:
8. Augusta Savage: The Shape of a Sculptor’s Life by Marilyn Nelson: This biography-in-verse by poet Marilyn Nelson is about Harlem Renaissance sculptor Augusta Savage’s life and work. Poems—some of which are concrete, taking the shape of their subject matter—are interspersed with photographs, from those of Savage’s famed sculptures Gamin, The Harp, and Realization to images of twentieth-century Harlem and the Hudson Valley farmhouse where she retired.
9. Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson: This memoir-in-verse about Woodson’s childhood growing up between South Carolina and Brooklyn in the 1960s and 70s is a powerful read, with individual poems that stand out on their own. In “A Girl Named Jack,” Woodson shares the story of her name: “Jacqueline, just in case / I grew up and wanted something a little bit longer / and further away from / Jack.”
10. Love, Love by Victoria Chang: Love, Love is written from the perspective of Frances Chin, a Chinese-American middle schooler in Detroit. At school, she’s bullied, while at home, her sister Clara’s hair is mysteriously falling out. With her best friend Annie, Frances tries to get at the root of Clara’s condition, while discovering her love of tennis and the strength of her own voice along the way.
11. Requiem: Poems of the Terezín Ghetto by Paul B. Janeczko: This multi-vocal novel, based on historical research, chronicles the Terezín Ghetto, where Jewish communities from Prague and beyond were relocated by the Nazis. While there is a strong focus on the inhumanity of the guards, the hardships, and the devastating number of residents lost in the ghetto itself and, later, in concentration camps, Janeczko also highlights moments of perseverance and resistance: there are secret orchestral concerts, communal care across family lines, and small acts of solidarity from a resident of the adjacent town.
12. The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba’s Struggle for Freedom by Margarita Engle: This novel-in-verse, written in a multiplicity of voices, tells the story of Cuba’s long fight for independence from Spain, which stretched from 1868-1898. At the center of it all is Rosa la Bayamesa, a real-life healer and herbalist who risked her life to tend to wounded rebels, operating out of huts, caves, and while on the move.
13. They Call Me Güero: A Border Kid’s Poems by David Bowles: Güero is a seventh grader and passionate reader growing up along the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas. He delights in the cactus and mesquite of his desert home, the taste of atole and tamales, and listening to ranchera records with his bisabuela. From his father, Uncle Joe, and other family members, Güero learns about the Mexican Revolution, the shape-shifting nagual, struggles against racism in the United States, and how to stand up to bullies.
Anthologies:
14. El Futuro Canta en El Espacio / The Future Sings in Space, UA Poetry Center: This anthology, published in 2024 as part of the Poetry Center’s Writing the Community program, features work from middle and high school poets, including incarcerated students who are part of the CAPE school district.
High School & Above:
Novels-in-Verse:
15. A Million Quiet Revolutions by Robin Gow: Aaron and Oliver are two transgender boys in love in a small Pennsylvania town. When Aaron unexpectedly moves away, they adopt the names of a pair of transgender men—Aaron and Oliver—who were believed to have fought in the Revolutionary War, and write to one another using those names. Along the way, they discover more about themselves and contest with the way mainstream history obscures queer and trans lives.
16. Every Body Looking by Candice Iloh: Ada is a freshman at a historically Black college, and the child of an American mother and Nigerian father. In this lyric novel, she reflects on growing up, embracing her queerness, and falling in love with dance.
17. Home Is Not a Country by Safia Elhillo: Nima is a first-generation Muslim-American teen being raised in the United States by her single mother. She feels misunderstood by almost everyone around her and wishes she had the name she was nearly given, Yasmeen. Soon, the story takes a magical realist, time-traveling turn, and Nima must confront truths about her family and their past head on.
18. Moonwalking by Zetta Elliott and Lyn Miller-Lachmann: When JJ’s family home is foreclosed on, they move in with his grandma in Brooklyn. There he meets Honors student and street artist Pierre, and the two develop a complex friendship made rockier by JJ’s white privilege and the racism Pierre—who is Afro-Latinx—encounters. Set in the 1980s, this book is replete with artistic references to the era, including JJ’s favorite band, The Clash, and Pierre’s artistic hero, Jean-Michel Basquiat.
19. The Name She Gave Me by Betty Culley: Rynn lives on a garlic farm in Maine with her adoptive parents, but longs to find her birth family, despite her mother’s callous objections. This novel-in-verse chronicles her search, including her reunion with her little sister, Sorella, who is in foster care. Culley is an adoptee herself, and this is the rare book that gives frank and nuanced insight into that complex experience.
20. Under the Mesquite by Guadalupe García McCall: When Lupita’s mother is diagnosed with cancer, the Texas high schooler must step up and take on a bigger role within her household. She chronicles her life by writing underneath a beloved mesquite tree, unraveling stories about her family, Mexican-American culture, and pursuing her dream of becoming an actress.
Anthologies, Chapbooks & Collections:
21. between every bird, our bones by emet ezell: By mingling a cancer diagnosis, a year spent living in Jerusalem and organizing in solidarity with Palestinians, and experiences of the Jewish diaspora, transness, and economic precarity, ezell’s chapbook captures that overwhelming—but relatable—feeling of everything happening all at once. The text is punctuated with heartbreaking and poignant lines: in a conversation with ezell’s Palestinian friend Hassan about if he will ever be able to visit them in America, ezell writes, “we avoid the impossible / no, borders and bodies capsized with longing.”
22. Cricket’s Lament: Poemas de Duelo e Inocencia by Paola Valenzuela: In this bilingual Spanish-English collection, Valenzuela writes about her last years of high school in the border towns of Douglas, Arizona and Agua Prieta, Sonora. Poems about first love, learning how to live in a body, and navigating family dynamics intertwine with those in which she recognizes her own strength: “The same strong, stubborn force / that drives her, drives you,” she writes in “10 Pieces of Advice, When Fighting with Mamá.”
23. Iep Jaltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter by Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner: This book, written by a poet and environmental activist, is straight from the front lines of climate change. In it, Jetn̄il-Kijiner details the perseverance of Marshallese traditions as the islands and their people grapple with the devastating impacts of colonization, nuclear weapons testing, and rapidly rising sea levels.
24. Ink Knows No Borders: Poems of the Migrant and Refugee Experience, edited by Patrice Vecchione and Alyssa Raymond: This collection highlights the work of sixty-four poets who came or whose family came to the United States from all over the world. They write about leaving behind war-torn homelands, crossing the U.S.-Mexico border on foot, being newcomers in the United States (and the racism and assimilative pressures they face), multilingualism, and so much more. In his poem “Off-Island Chamorros,” Greg Santos Perez writes, “Remember: home is not simply a house, village, or island; home is an archipelago of belonging.”
25. Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice, edited by Francisco X. Alarcón and Odilia Galván Rodríguez: This anthology started as a Facebook group, “Poets Responding to SB 1070,” that Alarcón created in 2010, inspired by students protesting the passage of an Arizona law that, “legalize[d] racial profiling and police abuse of people ‘suspected’ of being in the United States without papers” as well as activism against the ethnic studies ban in Arizona high schools. The included poems, which were all first shared in that group, are about social justice, solidarity, resistance, ancestry, and visions for the future, with a particular focus on the struggles faced by communities along and impacted by the U.S.-Mexico border.
26. Revolutionary Letters by Diane Di Prima: Revolutionary Letters is a series of poems in epistolary form, written by Beat poet and political radical Diane Di Prima starting in the late 1960s. Lines like, “No one way works, it will take all of us / shoving at the thing from all sides / to bring it down,” have become rallying cries in modern-day struggles for social change.
27. Somebody Give This Heart a Pen by Sophia Thakur: In her first collection of poetry, London-based performance poet Thakur writes about love, friendship, gender, race, and immigration. In the title poem, Thakur underscores the power of words, writing, “Try to find space to hear what your heart says / Make it your best friend / Slow down and clock back into yourself // Give your heart a pen.”
28. The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food & Drink, edited by Kevin Young: With poems on everything from sharing a soda (Frank O’Hara) to chopping collards and kale (Lucille Clifton), this jam-packed anthology is sure to leave you hungry! While there are many poems about the delights of cooking and eating to be found in this volume, The Hungry Ear doesn’t shy away from tougher subjects, from food pantries (Martín Espada) to the relationship between sugar, slavery, and mass incarceration (Yusef Komunyakaa).
29. The World That Belongs to Us: An Anthology of Queer Poetry from South Asia, edited by Aditi Angiras and Akhil Katyal: This stunning collection includes work from South Asian poets living in the region and across the diaspora, who hold many different identities clustered around the concept of queerness, and who write in a myriad of languages, including Tamil, Urdu, Malayalam, Hindi, and English (for the purposes of this anthology, the poems have largely been translated into English). In the introduction, Angiras and Katyal ask, “What is a ‘queer poem’?,” and the contributors offer a broad range of answers, grappling with love, intimacy, loneliness, family, and so much more.
30. Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza by Mosab Abu Toha: In this 2022 book, Gazan poet Abu Toha chronicles life under occupation, from power outages to drone strikes to collecting shells and pebbles along the seashore. Abu Toha was able to leave Gaza with his family in late 2023, and his poem “We Love What We Have,” included in the book, has become a much-shared testament to the beauty and importance of Palestinian lives and lifeways.
31. Where Clouds Are Formed by Ofelia Zepeda: Words by Zepeda—a renowned Tohono O’odham poet and linguist—pop up across Tucson, from art museums to classrooms, and her poem “Proclamation” is a kind of anthem for the city. You’ll find that here among so many other gems: poems, written in both O’odham and English, that traverse hospital ICUs, stop at desert shrines, and celebrate the way camp smoke clings to clothing and hair. A must-read for any teen who calls Southern Arizona home.