So, You’re Writing a YA Verse Novel… with Laurin Becker Macios (via Zoom)

If you have drafted (or begun drafting, or want to draft) a verse novel, this course is for you. With particular attention to YA, where the verse novel market is flourishing, we will workshop novel sections weekly, providing feedback on elements of craft–from poetic rhythm to narrative arc–to help your novel shine from line to story. We will do this having read brief synopses to start, and will end the course with feedback on each book as a whole. The course will include light reading/discussion of successful YA verse novel excerpts, and each weekly Zoom will include an element of craft discussion, but main assignments will be peer workshop, with Zooms focusing primarily on workshop.

Laurin Becker Macios is the author of Calling Me Home, a Young Adult verse novel forthcoming from Holiday House in 2026, as well as Somewhere to Go, winner of the 19th annual poetry award from Elixir Press, and I Almost Was Animal, winner of the 2018 Writer’s Relief WaterSedge Poetry Chapbook Contest.Her poems are forthcoming in -ette review and Ibbetson Street and have appeared in Green Mountains Review online, [PANK], and elsewhere. The former Executive Director of Mass Poetry and former Program Director of the Poetry Society of America, she earned her MFA in Creative Writing Poetry from the University of New Hampshire, where she taught on fellowship. She lives in Connecticut.