The five young adult "Honor List" books of 2023 are all visual texts. These award-winning books offer tremendous stories in both pictures and words in the genres of realistic fiction, memoir, and historical nonfiction.

This article describes a teacher's willingness to perform an autobiographical spoken word poem in his classroom, which provided an important model for students as they composed and shared their own slam-style poems.

To combat the inevitable intellectual fatigue that autobiographical essay assignments often engender and, more importantly, to provide students with an authentic audience and purpose for their writing, the author designed an autobiographical assignment that liberates students from the traditional essay format while empowering them to envision…

This article describes a writing assignment called Conversations with Myself (CWM) in which students "talk back" to subtractive dominant narratives through a two-part process of text analysis and autobiographical, dialogic writing. The author presents a case study of Stephen (all names are pseudonyms) to illustrate how literacy supported…

This study features an analysis of more than 100 "multimodal autobiographies" that have been created as videos or PowerPoint presentations by preservice teachers during a seven-year period; trends in the data as well as implications for the preservice teachers' future practices are discussed.

Memoir covers narrative, informative, and persuasive writing, which are described in the Common Core State Standards: College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards for Writing (CCRA.W). Memoirs are narrative memories told through rich description, dialogue, setting, and characters; and they are based on true stories (CCSS. ELA-Literacy.CCRA.W.3).…

This article provides an overview of the Autobiography Project, listing the topics of the ten chapters and the targeted skills that accompany them. The authors discuss the purposes of each chapter and describe the methods incorporated to promote the four broad components of literacy. This unit also addresses almost all components of the Common…

When Don Imus made his infamous comments about the Rutgers University women's basketball team in 2007, he provoked widespread (yet short-lived) attention to the circulation of language practices demeaning to women of color. In an elective autobiographical writing course that the author designed with and for urban high school girls, the students…

Marie G. Lee, an Asian American growing up in the Midwest during the '60s and '70s wanted to be "normal". She uses this background to explore the search for identity in her characters as well as her self. Lee finally realizes that identity isn't a goal to be achieved but it is something that evolves like life.

Discusses how writing college and job applications can serve as a tool for teaching students to write autobiographies. (MM)

Discusses the history of the author's involvement with books for more than 65 years and with the teaching of English for more than 40 years. (DD)

Describes how nonfiction literary prose offers advantages that literary fiction does not by showing a sense of honesty that comes with a single voice telling things as they are seen by that person. Discusses important distinctions between personal essays and autobiographies. (SG)

Extensive discussion of Puerto Rican culture and Thomas' life as depicted in his book. (SP)

Discusses a women's literature course designed to explore the connections between the narratives that students read and discuss and the narratives that they live and write. Examines a variety of sources, including fiction, biography, autobiography, literary criticism, history, psychology, sociology, and popular culture. (RS)