Poetry Insights from Jane Yolen on Crafting Words, Wisdom, and Wonder

A podcast interview with Jane Yolen on The Growing Readers Podcast, a production of The Children’s Book Review.

In this episode, we welcome the legendary author, poet, and children’s book writer Jane Yolen.

From discussing Yolen’s daily routine of writing poetry to exploring her deep connection to literature and storytelling, this conversation is a journey into the heart and soul of a prolific writer. Yolen shares insights into her creative process for In and Out the Window, the inspiration behind her works, and the power of poetry in shaping young minds. Delve into the magic of words, wisdom, and wonder in this captivating episode.

Jane Yolen Talks About:

• Her daily routine of writing a poem a day for 18 years
• The significance of writing poetry as a creative practice to awaken the mind and fingers
• Childhood experiences and early exposure to literature and writing
• The impact of parental support and encouragement on Yolen’s writing journey
• Her prolific career with over 457 published books and counting
• Reflections on family dynamics and attitudes toward Yolen’s writing success
• Exploring the challenges and joys of writing for both children and adults
• The motivation behind Yolen’s passion for crafting books tailored for children
• Insights into what makes a poem resonate and endure over time
• Memorable experiences with poetry, including reciting Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”
• Her unexpected encounter with W.B. Yeats’ gravestone in Ireland
• The process of compiling and organizing Yolen’s poetry collection, In and Out the Window
• Educational and creative value of poetry in children’s literacy and classrooms
• Her hopes for the lasting impact of In and Out the Window on readers of all ages
• Practical advice and tips for aspiring poets and poetry enthusiasts
• Her one big takeaway: the importance of reading poetry aloud every day

Listen to the Show

Read the Transcription

Bianca Schulze

Well, hello, Jane Yolen. Welcome to The Growing Readers Podcast.

Jane Yolen

Thank you. I’m delighted to be here.

Bianca Schulze

Oh, my goodness. I mean, I have so many great questions to ask you, but I thought maybe because you’re such a well-known and prolific author, poet, and children’s book writer, I would love to start with a really general question. And that is, what’s something that you do in your everyday routine that you think would either surprise us or really just resonate as something we all do?

Jane Yolen

Well, for years, I wrote a poem a day and sent it out. By years, I mean 18 years; I wrote a poem a day and sent it out to over 1,000 subscribers. I wasn’t getting money for it. I just loved to write poems. And for me, writing a poem a day was a little bit like getting your fingers working, getting your brain working; it was a little go-start – you’re going to make it again today. And after about 18-19 years, I got a little tired of doing that. So now I write what I call an occasional poem, which I send out on the occasion.

Bianca Schulze

I love that. Well, in those 18 years, when you did it every single day, was there a specific part of the day that you did it, or was it just when you could fit it in?

Jane Yolen

First thing in the morning. Because I could sleep all day if you let me, but I needed something that said it was a wake-up call, and this was a wake-up call, not just to wake up, but to wake the brain up and the fingers so that they worked in coordination.

Bianca Schulze

I love that. All right, well, we often hear that to be a writer, you need to be a reader first. I’m curious if you agree with that, and do you consider yourself a reader just as much as a writer?

Jane Yolen

As a child, I would have considered myself as such. These days, I’m 85, and I just broke my hip, so I’m walking around on a cane. I’m not reading as much because I had what was evidently something called amnesia that you get from anesthesia, you can get from anesthesia. So, my reading skills have taken a huge step backward, but my writing skills are still there. I’m not quite sure why, but I’m thankful for that.

Bianca Schulze

Yeah, well, we’re thankful for that, too, and I hope that your hip improves. That does not sound very fun.

Jane Yolen

I think it is. I’ve been going to PT.

Bianca Schulze

Good. We’ll keep that up for sure. I’m wondering if you can recall a specific moment, either in your childhood or in adulthood, when you felt like you truly identified as a reader.

Jane Yolen

My parents were both huge readers, and both of them were writers of different kinds. My father wrote for the newspapers, but he also was a public relations man, so he wrote those kinds of things. My mother wrote short stories. She only sold, I think, one or two in her life, but she also, every day, worked on the New York Times crossword puzzle. So we had books everywhere, and all their friends seemed to be, all their adult friends seemed to be readers. So somehow, as a youngish child, not small, small, but maybe about five, four, or five, I got it in my head that all grownups were writers because all of their friends were writers, too.

I assumed, I mean, I knew that we lived in New York City. I could see taxi drivers and bus drivers, and I could see people who had stores and all that. I assumed they went home at night and wrote because that’s what my parents did, and that’s what their friends did. So it wasn’t a huge step to think that’s what I was going to do when I grew up, which meant I had to read to learn how to write. So, I was reading and writing at a very young age. I wrote my first poem in first grade. It was terrible. I could even recite it to you, but it was terrible. It was a first-grader’s poem, but that made me understand that you can write poems, even if you’re a kid. I wrote the class play. We were all some kind of vegetable and ended up in salads and soup together.

Bianca Schulze

I love it.

Jane Yolen

I was the chief carrot. Because, of course, if you’re going to write a play, you might as well write the best part for yourself.

Bianca Schulze

Absolutely.

Jane Yolen

So I was writing and getting awarded, in a sense, very young.

Bianca Schulze

Yeah. It seems like it’s completely in your fiber just to be immersed in words and language, and I think that’s so wonderful. I wanted to ask you since—tell me if my number is wrong—but you have over 400 published books. Is that correct? 

Jane Yolen

457, I think. 

Bianca Schulze

Which is absolutely incredible. 

Jane Yolen 

Wait a minute. Wait a minute. There are 30 more that have sold.

Bianca Schulze

Oh, my goodness.

Jane Yolen

And I’m writing new ones now that haven’t sold yet.

Bianca Schulze

That’s incredible, Jane. And so when you said that your mom only maybe sold one or two, I was wondering, do you know how she felt about you and your success? Did she get to see it?

Jane Yolen

Well, this is both a nice and a sad story. My father never read a book of mine. He said they’re not real books because they were for children or when I wrote a couple of novels, they were science fiction. He was not interested, so he said they were not books and he didn’t read them. He did read everything my brother wrote. My brother was, and still is, somebody who writes news reports, who was at one point head of an overseas broadcasting.

Jane Yolen

There is that. My mother read every manuscript and talked to me about them, and we would talk about it, and she was the one who would tell all her friends, all their friends, my new book. She would push the book. She had copies of the book because I gave them copies of any new books. She would keep them right there on a table. And if one of their friends would come, she would say, this is Jane’s new book. And at one point, one woman came, who you know, she went sort of, “Oh, that’s nice.” But she didn’t even open the book because she was writing for adults. And my mother said, “Read the book.” It was a picture book, so the woman under my mother’s eye sat there and read the book. And then she looked up, and she said, “But this is a real story.” And my mother said, “Yes, it is.”

Bianca Schulze

Oh, my God.

Jane Yolen

That was the difference between my parents and their responses to my being a writer. I’m not sure if I just wrote adult books; my father would have liked them. I think he was just more interested in what my brother was writing. That’s fine. My brother was doing good writing, too.

Bianca Schulze

Yeah, I love that perspective on it, and I love it when you sort of told us about your dad, and you finished it with it, and so there’s that. And obviously, you’ve compartmentalized that section, and I’m grateful that your mom really nourished you. I think that’s wonderful. I think moms are so good at doing that. So I am curious because you write for adults and children. What is it that really fuels your passion for creating books specifically tailored for children? So, what’s your driving force for writing when you write for children?

Jane Yolen

I like to tell a story, and maybe I just have a very short idea of a story. Maybe I was still left back in childhood, but the stories that I have brought forward, that I still remember are stories like Lewis Carroll’s stories or all the Arthurian legends or all the fairy tales that I ever read. Those are the ones that are closest to my heart and so I want to be in that group. I want to be the Hans Christian Anderson of America or the Lewis Carroll of America. I want to be able to be that person who can tell those stories that live so long that the children of the next and the next and the next generations will recite them.

I mean, I can stand up in front of a group of people and do half of Lewis Carroll’s just— “Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe: all mimsy with the borogoves, and the mome raths outgrabe.” No one had to remind me, told me I had to remember that story. Nobody said I had to present that poem in school. I loved it so much and read it so often that I can tell it now, and I’m 85.

Bianca Schulze

I don’t know if you can tell, but that response just made my eyes water because you are that person for so many, and I love that. I can’t believe you just cited that to me. I mean, this is incredible. I love this. And it’s like what I said before: literature, words, and storytelling are in every fiber of you. It’s magical.

Jane Yolen

But I have to tell you that I’m not the only one. I was, last year or the year before, invited to Smith College. I’m a Smith College—it was my college—to a kind of reunion performance of various writers and poets to come and read something of their own and a favorite poem of theirs. And I said I would read Emily Dickinson. And they said, well, we already have several people doing Emily Dickinson. Can you choose something else? And I said, well, okay, I will do the Jabberwocky. And she said, well, you can do an Emily Dickinson and Jabberwocky because Jabberwocky was clearly not as far up on her list as it was on mine.

And when it was my turn, I did the Dickinson. My favorite Dickinson is “Tell all the truth but tell it slant. Success in circuit lies.” Which I love the way lies is kind of stuck in there. But then I said, but here’s the poem I really want to do, and I was the last person to do it. We really want to do it. And I started the Jabberwocky, and the entire group of must have been 200 people in the audience started reciting it with me.

Bianca Schulze

That’s incredible. I feel like the energy in that room would have been just so amazing to experience, and I think that’s the power of anything written for children. I think sometimes, and you’re welcome to agree or disagree, that writing for children is actually harder than writing for adults because you’re trying to create something that is easier, maybe, to digest but equally as profound. And I think anything that we also read as children ourselves hits us in the heart or in the mind; it does, and it stays with us. And I think that experience in that room is evidence of that.

Jane Yolen

Yeah. That would not have been a poem that people of my age and slightly younger who were out in the audience would have had to memorize in school. We would have had to memorize some lofty, high-level stuff. This was stuff we read so often it became part of our DNA.

Bianca Schulze

Yeah. You read it so often by choice, not because somebody told you to.

Jane Yolen

Exactly. Yeah.

Bianca Schulze

Well, poetry can sometimes seem a bit daunting for those who aren’t familiar with the genre or as familiar with the genre. Do you have any friendly advice or strategies that you could share to help readers approach and enjoy poetry more easily?

Jane Yolen

Well, in this new book, Inside and Outside, that I did of poems, I actually have poems about how to read a poem, how to write a poem, how to feel a poem, and how to move with a poem. I think the book itself has moments where it speaks to that very thing. I think that reading a poem out loud as opposed to reading it quietly, both are good, but if you read it out loud, you hear all the resonances in your ears. If you only read it by sight, you are missing, I would say, a good half of what a poem is about.

Bianca Schulze

Yeah, I would agree with that. You’re somebody who has certainly mastered the art of poetry. So what do you think are the key ingredients that make a poem really sing and do you have a secret source of your own when crafting your own poetry?

Jane Yolen

Well, I don’t worry about rhyme. I mean, I can rhyme standing on my head. My husband and I, he’s also a poet, we’ll be driving around in the car, and we start playing rhyme games with one another as we’re going along. Sometimes I think, though, that the most wonderful poems are the ones that surprise you. The end line of one of my favorite poems talks about a monster that is slouching towards Bethlehem to be born, and that gives me shivers every time I think of the ending because it’s not what you were expecting. That monster, it’s our come round, at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.

All you have thought about in your consideration of Bethlehem and something being born in Bethlehem is not a monster. You know, and it blows the top of your head off. What is he saying? What is he telling us in that poem? You know, Yeats is really, really one of those sneaky poets who gets behind you and pushes you up the hill to new discoveries. Speaking of new discoveries, can I tell you about my Yeats’ moment?

Bianca Schulze

Absolutely, you can.

Jane Yolen

My late husband and I were driving on a trip all the way through Ireland. We’d been in the car for a while, and I said, I’ve got to get out of the car and walk a little bit. Then there was a little, small, little church with a little graveyard, and I love old graveyards because you can read the stones and they tell you wonderful stories. And so I got out, and as I’m walking around, I stumbled over a rock, put my hand out onto one of the gravestones, and my face came face to face with it, and it said, “Horseman, pass by”. I went, “Horseman, pass by”? That’s a line by Yeats, and then I stood back, and it was Yeats’ gravestone.

I had stumbled in the middle of Ireland, where I had never been before; I had stumbled over Yeats’ gravestone. And I was just, this is telling me something – I need to go read more Yeats, try to write like Yeats a little more. It was astonishing.

Bianca Schulze

Yeah, I’m astonished. I’m sitting here thinking, did you have any idea that Yeats’ gravestone was even in that cemetery? No, no idea.

Jane Yolen

No, I didn’t even know what the church’s name was. It was just a little church. I needed to get out and walk, that’s all. Here’s a graveyard. Can I get out and walk? That was the entire conversation between my husband and me. It’s okay. So he got out, stood out, and looked like that, but he was not—folded his arms; he was not interested in walking around the graveyard. But I’m a graveyard walker. And there it was.

Bianca Schulze

That’s amazing. I want to take a little tangent because now that I know that you’re a graveyard walker, which I did not know before, I recently read an article that often everybody has their own love language; for me and my family, it’s reading. I imagine that my gravestone will have some sort of literature quotes on it. Others obviously put a line of poetry. But I realized that cooking is a big love language for people, and I didn’t know that. Some gravestones have a family recipe on them, and there are people who walk around cemeteries looking for family recipes to write down.

Jane Yolen

I never heard of that.

Bianca Schulze

Oh, my goodness. Well, now I was wondering if that is true. I don’t know. So you don’t know either?

Jane Yolen

I don’t know either, but it might become a poem very soon.

Bianca Schulze

Yes, family, I feel as though gravestones are probably a really good representation of what each individual’s love language is like and how they gave to their community and their family. Whether it’s poetry, cooking, reading, whatever that might be anyway, it’s so fascinating that you’re a graveyard walker. I love that.

Jane Yolen

I have often thought that my gravestone should read “She wrote many good books, and one great one,” and just leave it at that and let people guess or fight over it or argue it or write an essay on which one was the great one.

Bianca Schulze

Yeah. Well, I can tell you that my children would probably tell you, How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? They’re all older now and onto novels and even adult books, but that story was a staple in our house.

Jane Yolen

Thank you. That, like this new book, was something that was pushed by an editor. I had an editor who called me up. She was also a close friend. I used to be an editor, too, so I have many friends in publishing who are editors. And she said, my little boy, Robbie, is three. He loves dinosaurs, and he hates to go to bed at night. Can you do something for him? Write something for him? And I said I’d send him a little poem, and I wrote How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? It was just a poem, and she called back about half an hour later, and she said, “It worked.” She said, “He’s fast asleep now. He loved the poem, but it’s not a poem.” I said, “Of course, it’s a poem.” She said, “No, it’s a book, and I’m publishing it.”

Bianca Schulze

Yes, I love that story. I love that. I love the way it came about, and I love the actual book itself. So, between all of you, I feel like it’s what so many moms and dads needed to tuck their kids in. Well, I feel like we need to dive in now to this new book, In and Out the Window. And you already touched on this, but there are some sneaky hidden lessons on the why and the when and how to write poetry and how to read poetry, and it’s kind of sprinkled throughout In and Out the Window. So, do you want to share the inside scoop on how you chose to weave these little nuggets of wisdom into your poetry collection?

Jane Yolen

In some ways, I’m a poetry lover. In other ways, I’m a poetry pusher. In some ways, poetry is a sneaky way of getting into literature. Life works, surprising storylines, et cetera. And I didn’t want the book to be just poems about inside and outside. I really wanted there to be something more that kind of anchored it. When I thought of that, I thought, how do I anchor this? And I said, I’m going to write, just as I write a poem a day. I’m going to write a poem for each section about poetry because there are many ways of dealing with poems, there are many ways of learning about poems, and there are many ways of reading poems, and I wanted to talk about all of them as I went along.

So they’re sort of like little, the poems about poetry are like little nuggets or maybe little bananas that you can peel each time you go through and find something good and yummy underneath. It was also a way to end a section. Otherwise, I mean, I could have gone on and on and on and on and on, so I wanted to do something that you could look forward to ending – that, oh, this is the end of this section because here’s the poem about poetry. Yeah.

Bianca Schulze

Clever. And just further proof, not that anybody needs any proof, that you are indeed a poet, but I love little nuggets of wisdom. And I always call them little nuggets of wisdom. But I loved that you just called it a banana that you peel back, and inside is that little special treat. I mean that was such a great description. So thank you for saying that. I loved that. So I would love to know, with this sort of collection, and there’s new poems in there, there’s poems that were previously published elsewhere in there, so how did you decide which poem to kick off the entire book?

Jane Yolen

When I was writing the book, it came in sections, and I didn’t write it from top to bottom. I wrote, “Oh, let me work on this section. Oh, I know. Oh, that really belongs in that section over there. So it was not easy; it was not pretty putting it together because I had old poems and new poems, and sometimes I was rewriting old poems to make them fit more easily under that particular place. It also went so fast, I think, that Jill Santopolo, who was the editor of the book, I think, was expecting a year’s long slog through it, and suddenly, there she had it in her lap very quickly thereafter because I had so many books, had so many poems already written.

Bianca Schulze

I think sometimes it’s easy from the outside to think that a book comes together in such a linear, easy way, but it doesn’t always. Sometimes it is sort of tricky, but then when the puzzle pieces all fit, then it just suddenly all clicks together in a short time.

Jane Yolen

It looks better from the outside than it was from the inside when I was working on it. But the other thing about working on this particular book was that, yes, I had a lot of old poems I could put in. Some of them were published, some of them were unpublished, but then I had to write new poems, and I had little corners and little special places where it needed this kind of poem, or a poem about poetry, for example. And that was fun because it pushed me to write new poems I might have never written at all.

Bianca Schulze

I love that. All right, so this is my next question. In your experience, how do you think poetry serves as a handy tool for teaching and learning, and how do you see, in particular In and Out the Window fitting into children’s literacy and creativity in a classroom?

Jane Yolen

Well, to begin with, poems are usually short, especially poems for children. I’m not getting into the big, long poems, The Odyssey, The Iliad, and all of that sort of stuff. Poems for children are normally pretty short, and because they’re short, they can be like a little piece of wisdom from the teacher to the child or from the page to the child. I think in this book, those little poems of wisdom are seen very easily in the poems that are about how to read a poem, how to write a poem, how to hear a poem, and how to feel a poem. Those tell you pretty succinctly something. They’re still poetic, but they’re also telling you they’re giving you stairs and stepways up to the poems themselves.

But I also think poems have a way of being like a little earworm. That’s why we remember them. They’re small enough, usually, short enough, usually, tight enough, usually, and surprising enough, usually, to stick, and you suddenly find yourself years later, “How did I remember that? Where did that come from?” I can’t think of many lines in books I can remember. I can remember the opening of a couple of novels, but that’s not the same as remembering an entire poem.

A poem is like a blossom that’s opened up, and you can close it back down again in a sense and remember certain lines, but they lead you to opening up the whole thing again. It doesn’t happen with a novel. The novel really takes time, substantial time to read. And most of it, you’ll forget. You’ll forget moments, moments of horror, moments of love, moments of movement, but you’re not likely to remember a lot of particular lines in a novel. You are going to remember particular lines in a poem and they become watchwords for you.

Bianca Schulze

Absolutely. Well, looking ahead, when readers have this book in their hand, In and Out the Window, I’m wondering whether those readers are young or young at heart. What do you hope will be the lasting impact on them?

Jane Yolen

One of the things that I think that the book does is it doesn’t just show one kind of poem. It shows many different kinds of poems. There are poems that rhyme. There are poems that don’t rhyme. There are poems that are almost like little jokes. There are poems that, like the one about Martin Luther King, I would love to see and hear set to music. I think it would set to music easily. There are some poems there that can be acted out. There are some poems there that need to be shouted. So, I think there’s enough variety in the book to cover an awful lot of poetry to be taught.

There are books, big books, that are very successful, and rightfully so, of poetry that are funny, amusing or serious, not amusing, that can be interesting to read, can be respected, can be favorites. I think what this book is is a combination of because there are some very serious poems like The Line Goes On; there are some very humorous poems about a child in school or a child discovering in school that they’re really in school for good reasons there. So, there are serious poems. There are funny poems. There are deep poems. There are not-deep poems. There are two-line poems. There’s a little bit of everything.

So I think that it’s a kind of poetry book that you could have open for reading in a classroom, and people could tell you, “Oh, this is my favorite, or that’s my favorite, nobody else’s favorite.” So it’s a kind of practice for reading poetry for the rest of your life.

Bianca Schulze

Yeah, I love it. And I think it’s worth going back to what you said about poetry being a flower. There is going to be a poem in that book that speaks to everybody, and it’s going to be different for everybody. It’s going to be that little flower that opens up for them, and I think that’s magical. Before we wrap up, Jane, do you have any pro tips or friendly advice for aspiring poets who may be looking to sharpen their skills or maybe even just some words of wisdom for those just dipping their toes into the world of poetry?

Jane Yolen

I think, first of all, the toes in the water is important. If you have never read poetry, don’t just try putting stuff together. You don’t know what poetry is. Pick three to four poems, or poets, and look at what they’ve done, and you’ll see how also, they don’t repeat themselves. They may be reinventing themselves. Emily Dickinson reinvented herself every time she wrote another poem.

So I think that you need both, whether you’re an adult or a child, whether you’re a teacher or a student, you need to be reading broadly in poetry, and you need to be reading both silly and serious. You need to be reading both for grownups and for kids. You need to be reading rhymed and unrhymed. You need to read aloud and then recite it to yourself quietly because the ear and the eye are different listeners. If somebody else reads it to you, that voice will become the voice of the poem for you.

Bianca Schulze

Yeah, I think that almost took us full circle in the sense that to be a writer, that it’s important to be a reader, you know, first, or in sync with, so I think that was important. Well, Jane, I love to ask this question right before we go, and that is, what would you pick to be one big takeaway from our conversation today for the listeners if they just were to take away one thing that we talked about today? What would you want that to be?

Jane Yolen

Read a poem out loud to yourself every morning or every night.

Bianca Schulze

Perfect. Oh, my gosh. Jane, you have no idea how special it was for me to be able to connect with you, not just by written words on paper but face to face through our computer screens. You are an absolute delight. It is clear that words and language and poetry run through your veins.

I really, really enjoyed reading In and Out the Window, and my favorite parts were always those ending poems on how to write, how to read, and when to write. I’m not going to give any spoilers away, but there’s great little tips in there. But also, there is no wrong or right way to write a poem. It’s what’s coming from your heart, and what comes from your heart, Jane, is beautiful, and I’m so glad that you share it with the world. Thanks for coming on the show.

Jane Yolen

Thanks for having me.

About the Book

Publisher’s Book Summary: The largest single anthology of Jane Yolen’s poetry, containing more than one hundred poems for all occasions—with fun black-and-white art throughout.

Our Kitchen
Smells of mornings,
blueberry muffins,
hot chocolate, tea.
It smells of bacon
and of eggs.
It smells of family.

For the first time, legendary author Jane Yolen gathers the largest single anthology of her poetry celebrating childhood. At home or at school, playing sports or practicing music, enjoying the holidays or delighting in each season, Jane Yolen’s masterful collection shows just how lively it is to be a kid. With whimsical artwork by Cathrin Peterslund, this collection of more than one hundred poems is a classic that children are sure to return to again and again.

Buy the Book

Show Notes

Jane Yolen was born and raised in New York City and now lives in Hatfield, Massachusetts, and Mystic, Connecticut. She graduated from Smith College and received her master’s degree in education from the University of Massachusetts. She has six honorary doctorates from New England colleges and universities for her body of work. The distinguished author of well over four hundred books, Jane Yolen is a person of many talents.

Many of Yolen’s stories and poems are rooted in her sense of family and self. The Emperor and the Kite, which was a Caldecott Honor Book in 1968 for its intricate paper-cut illustrations by Ed Young, was based on Yolen’s relationship with her late father, who was an international kite-flying champion. Owl Moon, winner of the 1988 Caldecott Medal for John Schoenherr’s exquisite watercolors, was inspired by her husband’s interest in birding.

You can visit Jane Yolen online at ⁠https://www.janeyolen.com/ or follow her on Facebook at Facebook.com/JaneYolen.

Cathrin Peterslund is an illustrator from Denmark. She attended the Animation Workshop, where she studied comics and illustration, and in 2017, earned a BA in graphic storytelling. She enjoys exploring patterns and textures, using both traditional and digital media, and her work is very often highly detailed, inspired by nature, folklore, and magical universes.

You can visit Cathrin Peterslund online at CathrinPeterslund.com or follow her on Instagram @CathrinPeterslund.

Thank you for listening to the Growing Readers Podcast episode: Poetry Insights from Jane Yolen on Crafting Words, Wisdom, and Wonder. For the latest episodes from The Growing Readers Podcast, Subscribe or Follow Now.