"Collage, Confession, and Crisis in Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming"

I argue that in contemporary children's and young adult literature, the collage effect is used in order to unsettle the traditional Künstlerroman, the artist's coming-of-age narrative, and make visible the political and social forces that help to shape the writer's developmental process. Woodson's verse novel employs collage in both form and content by blending lyric, document, image, and found family object in order to...