At my job?  Yeah right.  But it is once again time for the weekly YA round-up.  This week is poetry and short stories and is probably the 1st week I hadn’t previously read anything.  So here’s a look

Bronx Masquerade by Nikki Grimes

Mr. Ward, new English teacher, begins holding Friday Poetry readings for class.  Through the book each class member “presents.”  I really like the mix of prose with poetry.  The book is set up very similar to Canterbury Tales, each character gets a prose prologue and then their poem and reaction from the class bard Tyronne.  Grimes handles all the different voices wonderfully each one separate and unique.  I hear the audiobook is done using a different teen for each character.  Might be cool to check it out.  Very Awesome.

Red Hot Salsa ed. by Lori Marie Carlson

This is your more traditional collection of poetry written by Latino authors.  The poems are bilingual meaning they have both English and Spanish versions of all the poems.  There is also a helpful glossary for those less skilled Spanish speakers.  Although the collection is targeted to YAers most of the poems are written by established adult authors.  Which is fantastic but…yes the but, it would have been great to see some teen poems mixed it too.  But maybe that another book.  There is also an awesome cover with some cool art work but none on the inside?  There are very small nit-picks.  The poetry is good, maybe not as powerful to me as to someone else but I enjoyed it still.  Gets a Cool. 

Guys Write for Guys Readed. by Jon Scieszka

A collection of stories, artwork and comics from all the biggest guy writers in YA and kids and beyond.  Maybe the reason I wanted to see art work in Red Hot Salsa was because every other profile in Guyshad a picture or a cartoon or something.  It was really fun to see some of the illistrators’ art work from when they were younger.  Each author also had a Born, Live, Random Fact and Selected Biography which I thought was great too.  I would recognize the name and then put the book to author when I got to the end.  My favorite was Mo Willems cartoon about when he was younger he sent a letter to the Peanuts writer.  So funny, so fun, so Awesome.

The Best American Nonrequired Reading2007 ed. by Dave Eggers.

Interestingly we were told not to read all of this title, only the forward.  Well this edition didn’t have a forward, just a clever little Q&A that did answer the question I think we’ll be about tonight.  That is the Nonrequired Reading series is chosen by a committee high school kids in the San Fransico area.  So that’s cool.  I also picked this year’s because it included a set of funny lists at the beginning and a commencment speech from Conan O’Brien.  So we’ll see what we do with it in class.  So far, so Awesome.