Introducing ICTE 2025 Keynote Speaker Helen Frost
By Lauren Rich, Ph.D., Professor of English at Grace College and ICTE Treasurer (richlg@grace.edu)
While not a native Hoosier, Helen Frost has lived in Fort Wayne for over thirty years, won two Indiana Authors Awards, and received fellowships from Indiana Humanities and the Indiana Arts Commission. She has written award-winning books for readers of all ages but is best known for her middle-grade and young adult verse novels including Keesha’s House (2003; Michael L. Printz Honor Award); Hidden (2011; William Allen White Award); Salt (2013; NY Historical Society’s Children’s History Book Prize); and All He Knew (2020; Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction, Midland Authors Award, and Indiana Author Award). She has also collaborated with photographer Rick Lieder on several picture books—most recently, The Mighty Pollinators (2024).
I often reach for Frost’s verse novels when teaching the Young Adult Literature course for language arts education majors at Grace College. I am constantly surprised by how many of my students are unfamiliar with the verse novel or novel-in-poems, as it is sometimes called. I am not surprised by how quickly they fall in love with the form and recognize its pedagogical potential. Scholars and educators have taken note of the recent “rise of the verse novel” and its ability to stimulate students’ interest in reading poetry (see, for example, the April 2018 special issue of The Lion & the Unicorn dedicated to this topic).
Frost is, first and foremost, a poet, which is to say she pays meticulous attention to her writing craft. In an interview, she acknowledges, “for me, each novel emerges from careful attention to language, including the form, the sound, and the imagery, things I first learned through poetry.” Frost never “writes down” to her young readers and, as a result, I find that her books stand up to older audiences (including my undergraduates). Frost’s writing is carefully researched, stirring without being sentimental, elegant as it navigates between the sensory and the symbolic. Consider, for example, this passage from one of the lyrical nature poems interspersed throughout Salt: “Tears come from earth and sky,/ from words moving through us./ We taste them as they fall,/ leaving salt streaks on our faces.”
Teaching Helen Frost’s Novels
Because of her years of experience as an educator, Helen’s books work especially well in a classroom setting. Here are two of my favorites, along with some resources for each. In each of these novels, Frost uses innovative concrete or “shaped” poetic structures, which can be used to prompt students to write their own shape poems.
Salt: A Story of Friendship in a Time of War (Farrar, Straus & Giraux; 176 pages; grades 4-8) tells the story of a tenuous friendship between a white settler’s son and a Myaamia boy during the War of 1812. This multivocal verse novel is especially suited for Hoosier classrooms as it is set near Fort Wayne and humanizes Indiana state history. It’s a compelling and well-researched work of historical fiction, but most readers will require additional historical context to understand the larger events and issues the novel alludes to.
Resources:
Full-text of 1803 Treaty of Fort Wayne (note esp. Article 3, concerning salt): https://treaties.okstate.edu/treaties/treaty-with-the-delawares-etc-1803-0064
Indiana Historical Society’s “Native Americans in Indiana” Curriculum Resources: https://indianahistory.org/education/education-resources/educator-resources/curriculum/native-americans-in-indiana/
Myaamia scholar George Ironstack’s commentary on Salt: https://aacimotaatiiyankwi.org/2013/11/12/faqssalt/
Diamond Willow (Farrar, Straus & Giraux; 128 pages; grades 4-8) focuses on a twelve-year-old, part-Athabascan musher named Willow and her sled dog Roxy. Most of the novel is written as a series of diamond-shaped poems containing a smaller poem hidden within—a structure inspired by polished diamond willow wood. This unique structure invites readers to slow down and navigate each poem twice—once focusing on the larger poem and once on the smaller poem contained within—as well as consider the relationship between the two. This invitation to close-reading is balanced by a fast-paced survival-adventure plot.
Resources:
Iditarod.edu Diamond Willow Unit Plan for Grades 5-8: https://iditarod.com/edu/book-study-diamond-willow-a-novel-in-poetry/
Discussion Questions & Writing Guide from the Publisher: https://images.macmillan.com/folio-assets/activity-guides/9780374317768AG.pdf
Meet Helen Frost at the ICTE 2025 Conference at Grace College on March 29, where she will give our keynote lecture. Each conference registrant will receive a free copy of one of Frost’s books, which they can have signed at the conference.
Register for the ICTE 2025 Conference here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/2025-icte-spring-conference-tickets-1055014249019?aff=oddtdtcreator
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