Voices from the Middle invites submissions for our Young Adult Literature Reviews and Recommendations section. What YA books are capturing your attention? Which stories have sparked meaningful conversations, inspired inquiry, challenged assumptions, or expanded perspectives? Submit reviews that reflect on compelling new and noteworthy young adult literature, considering the possibilities these texts offer for our youth, teachers, and literacy adolescents communities.

We invite anyone who is able—middle school students, teachers, literacy educators, librarians, teacher educators, and researchers—to share the books they are reading and to reflect on why these texts matter in today’s classrooms and our world.

Reviews should move beyond summary to consider the literary qualities of the text, its relevance for readers, and its potential to support engaging, inclusive, and meaningful literacy experiences. We especially welcome recommendations that spotlight contemporary issues, diverse voices, and books that encourage curiosity, empathy, critical thinking, and joyful, hopeful, complex reading. As we keep seeing, YA literature helps adolescents make sense of themselves, their communities, and the world; thus, we invite you to frame your review(s) as (a) contribution to ongoing conversations that further nuance current debates in the realm / world / field of adolescent literacy.

Whether you have discovered an outstanding debut novel, an overlooked gem, or a title you cannot stop talking about, we encourage you to share your YA lit reviews with the Voices from the Middle community. Let’s continue to build a vibrant conversation around the literature that shapes our beautiful reading lives.

Voices from the Middle invites submissions of original poetry that celebrates the power of language to illuminate the lives, experiences, and imaginations of youth. We welcome poems from students, teachers, librarians, literacy coaches, teacher educators, researchers, and others whose work is connected to the middle grades.

Poetry invites us to notice, question, remember, and imagine. It helps young people—and those who teach them—make sense of themselves, their communities, and the world. We seek poems that reflect the joys, challenges, curiosities, and complexities of teaching, learning, reading, writing, and growing alongside adolescents.

We encourage submissions that explore classroom moments, literacy experiences, identity, belonging, language, justice, humor, family, friendship, or the everyday glitches that shape the lives of middle grades students and educators. We welcome both established and emerging poets and invite work in a variety of poetic forms and styles.

We also encourage brief reflections introducing a favorite poem that has inspired your teaching or resonated with your students. How has poetry opened conversations, fostered empathy, sparked inquiry, or deepened your understanding of adolescent literacy?

Whether your work offers celebration, contemplation, or challenge, consider sharing poetry that reminds you why language matters and how it continues to shape the habits and lived experiences of readers and writers.

The teacher’s voice is crucial / cultural. Teachers / educators often write creatively but rarely have a venue for our work. VM believes poetry is a vital form of professional and personal inquiry. Through poetry, educators document classroom moments, wrestle with questions of identity and justice, celebrate students’ brilliance, and give voice to the everyday experiences that define adolescent literacy. We aim to position poetry not as an add-on, but as another way educators / teachers think, reflect, and contribute to the field.

Hope is not passive optimism. bell hooks’s vision of education as a practice of freedom invites us to understand hope as an act of resistance—a choice to imagine and work toward a more just, humane, and liberatory world. In our classrooms, literacy practices can nurture that hope. Through reading, writing, speaking, listening, and inquiry, young people learn not only to make meaning of their experiences but also to envision possibilities beyond the limitations imposed upon them.

Literacy has long been a source of empowerment. It enables individuals and communities to preserve stories, question inequities, participate in civic life, and imagine new futures. For educators committed to equity and justice, literacy is more than a set of skills; it is a means of fostering agency, critical consciousness, and connection. Echoing the work of bell hooks, we understand education as a practice of freedom—one grounded in dialogue, care, curiosity, and the belief that learning can transform both individuals and communities.

As new technologies continue to reshape how we communicate, create, and access information, educators are also being called to help students critically examine the tools and systems that influence their lives. Inspired in part by my reading of Meenoo Rami’s A Teacher’s Guide to Using AI, I find myself increasingly drawn to questions about literacy, technology, and human flourishing.

For this issue, however, we invite manuscripts that explore literacy as a source of hope. How do literacy practices help young adolescents develop voice, agency, belonging, and purpose? How do reading, writing, discussion, and inquiry help students imagine and create more just futures? We welcome manuscripts that illuminate the ways literacy can sustain hope, nurture critical consciousness, and empower young people to engage meaningfully with their world.

Rami, M. (2026). A teacher’s guide to using AI. Heinemann. 

Artificial intelligence has arrived in middle level classrooms, but many educators are still navigating what this moment means for teaching and learning. While headlines alternately celebrate AI as a revolutionary force or warn of its dangers, middle school English language arts teachers are often left to do the real work themselves—experimenting, questioning, adapting, and learning alongside their students. In many schools, meaningful professional learning around AI remains limited, yet teachers continue to explore how these emerging technologies can support literacy instruction, curriculum design, assessment, communication, and student engagement.

As Meenoo Rami reminds us, “equitable AI in education is less about merely gaining access and more about assuming that students are able to use it and interrogate its role in their lives and future workplaces and society” (p. 8). Rami’s words invite us to think beyond tools and technologies and toward questions of agency, equity, and possibility. How might AI reshape the ways students read, write, communicate, and learn? What language do educators need to understand and discuss AI critically? How can teachers make informed decisions about when, why, and how to use AI in their work? What does it look like when educators use AI to support planning, feedback, communication, and professional growth while maintaining their professional judgment and expertise? For this issue, we seek manuscripts that explore the current landscape of AI in middle level literacy education. We welcome classroom stories, practitioner reflections, research studies, and practical approaches that help illuminate the opportunities, challenges, and realities of teaching and learning with AI in the middle grades.

Rami, Meenoo (2026). A Teacher’s Guide to Using AI. Heinemann.

Submission Deadline: July 30, 2026

Middle level educators occupy a unique position in the lives of young adolescents. Every day, we invite students to engage with stories, ideas, and questions that shape how they understand themselves and the world around them. In doing so, we are not merely teaching literacy skills; we are helping students develop the intellectual, social, and ethical capacities necessary to participate in a democratic society. At its best, literacy education becomes a practice of freedom—one that affirms identity, nurtures voice, and empowers learners to act upon the world rather than simply adapt to it.

Building on the visions of bell hooks, this issue explores how educators create classrooms where literacy becomes a catalyst for critical inquiry, collective learning, and social transformation. How do teachers and students co-construct knowledge through dialogue and shared exploration? What texts, pedagogies, and literacy practices help young people examine issues of power, justice, and belonging? How can schools honor students’ cultural, linguistic, digital, and community literacies as sources of strength? What happens when youth are positioned not only as learners, but as leaders, advocates, creators, and change-makers?

For this issue, we seek manuscripts that examine literacy as a vehicle for freedom, participation, and possibility. We welcome contributions that highlight youth voice, culturally sustaining pedagogies, community-engaged learning, teacher leadership, and innovative approaches to reading, writing, and meaning-making. Together, we hope to showcase the many ways literacy continues to empower young people to imagine, question, create, and transform the world they inherit.

Submission Deadline: August 31, 2026

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly woven into the fabric of daily life, schools face an urgent challenge: preparing students not only to live with AI, but to understand, question, and use it responsibly. For middle level educators, this work extends beyond managing new technologies in the classroom. It requires helping young adolescents develop the critical literacy skills necessary to evaluate AI-generated information, recognize bias and misinformation, protect their privacy, and make thoughtful decisions about when and how AI should be used. Meenoo Rami argues that educators’ efforts to stay current on AI developments, provide students with both skills and context, and safeguard their well-being are fundamentally acts of equity.

If literacy education prepares students to participate fully in civic and cultural life, what new responsibilities emerge in an age of generative AI? How can teachers help students understand what AI is—and what it is not? What does it mean to teach students that AI can support learning while also producing inaccuracies, reproducing bias, collecting data, and complicating traditional notions of authorship? How might students learn to use AI as a tool for inquiry, creativity, revision, and problem-solving without surrendering their own agency and critical thinking. For this issue, we invite manuscripts that examine how educators can teach about AI and teach students to use AI thoughtfully, ethically, and effectively. We welcome contributions that explore classroom practices, curricular innovations, research findings, and community-centered approaches that prepare young people to navigate an increasingly AI-mediated future.

Submission Deadline: October 31, 2026