When Loss Gets Personal

Michelle M. Falter is an assistant professor of English education at North Carolina State University. Michelle’s scholarship focuses on dialogic, critical, and feminist pedagogies, emotion in the teaching of literature and writing in secondary classrooms, English teacher education, and adolescent literature. She has previously co-edited the book Teaching Outside the Box but Inside the Standards: Making Room for Dialogue with Teachers College Press.Steven T. Bickmore is an Associate professor of English Education at the University of Nevada and a past editor of The ALAN Review (2009-2014). He maintains a weekly academic blog on YA Literature—Dr. Bickmore's YA Wednesday (http://www.yawednesday.com/) and his research includes how English teachers negotiate the teaching of literature using young adult literature, especially around the issues of race, class, and gender.

This important collection of essays addresses the reality of the experience of death as an inevitable part of life and literature through rich, concrete, engaging classroom activities responding to a wide range of young adult and canonical novels. Contributors draw on their teaching experiences to describe specific methods along with extensive resources for fostering students’ discussions, writing, and artwork/media about characters’ experiences of grief, loss,depression, and mental illness associated with death and suicide.

• ForewordAuthor TBAAcknowledgementsIntroduction Michelle M. FalterPart I: SuicideChapter 1- Death and the Digital: Student Voices and Small Stories as Supplemental Texts to Thirteen Reasons WhyEmily C. PlummerChapter 2- Young Adults “Step Out” of Thirteen Reasons Why and Impulse: Moving from Personal Connection to AnalysisAlison Heron-Hruby, Mallory Aronhalt, Madison Beam, Hollibeth Francis, Danielle Jones, Haleigh Wells, and Brandie TrentChapter 3- Pursuing Mystery in A Tale for the Time Being: A Pedagogical Framework for Reading about Suicide with High School StudentsMark A. SulzerPart II: Terminal IllnessChapter 4- Accepting the Deadline and Forging Ahead: Literature through the Lens of Palliative Care in a High School English ClassroomChristian Z. Goering and Ginger GoeringChapter 5- Keeping it Real: Teaching Death Be Not Proud and This Star Won’t Go Out as Adolescent Narratives of LossMichelle M. FalterChapter 6- The Healing Power of Stories: Reading and Re-Reading A Monster CallsJon OstensonPart III- AccidentsChapter 7- The Thing about Grieving: Intellectual and Emotional Work in Ali Benjamin’s The Thing about JellyfishMary Harrell and Sharon KaneChapter 8- “Grieving Like a Normal Person”: Examining Responses to Grief in Nina LaCour’s We Are OkayJenna Spiering and Kate KedleyChapter 9- Envisioning Alternate Realities of Loss: Using Imagination to Bridge Classroom Conversations about Grief through Peter Pan and The Wendy ProjectNina R. Schoonover and Ashley A. AtkinsonChapter 10- Addressing Trauma and Death with Young Adolescents through Tears of a TigerMelissa A. Baker, Laronda Brown, and Marisa A. VicereChapter 11- Dealing with Death through Dialogue: Existentialism & Looking for AlaskaKatie RybakovaPart IV: Familial DeathChapter 12- The Intersectionality of Music and Mortality using Jason Reynold’s The Boy in the Black SuitLatasha McKinney and Rebecca MaldonadoChapter 13- Loss and the Perfection Crucible in The Bell Jar and The Catcher in the RyeAntonia Alberga-Parisi and Brittany PopeChapter 14- “My Mother is a Fish”: Exploring Grief through As I Lay DyingChea PartonAbout the EditorsAbout the ContributorsIndex