Review of "Unwritten: Young Authors Project" by Sheila Rowe and the Young Authors Project

​Score: 91+/100 (9.1+ out of 10)

Have you ever sat in a classroom staring at the clock, waiting for the final bell to ring? The teacher is still talking, papers are scattered across your desk, and your classmates have begun whispering, fidgeting, doodling, or staring into space. The second hand appears to have stopped moving altogether. You are technically supposed to be learning, but all you can think about is getting out of that chair and going home.

Now imagine that your teacher asks you to write a poem about it. That is essentially what happens in “Waiting for the Bell,” one of the poems in Unwritten: Young Authors Project. The young poet openly admits to sitting in class, wanting to leave, watching the minutes creep past, and wondering whether the teachers are covering material the students already know. Honestly, we appreciate the candor. There is something wonderfully funny about a student completing what appears to be a classroom poetry assignment by writing about how tired they are of sitting in the classroom. Hey, at least the assignment got done!

Unwritten, edited by Sheila Rowe and published by School Express Press, collects poetry and creative writing from 17 sixth- and seventh-grade students: Arlette Amaro Arias, Gage Bluestein, Daymien Carlos, Jayde Fernandez, Sofia Gonzalez, Jasmine Jamison, Nevaeh Jazo, Aria Lacchei, Genesis Luna Cabrera, Amelia Maragh, Isabella Mendez-Higareda, Scarlett Ortiz Martinez, Tania Perez Martinez, Angelo Quezada, Dorothy Serafin, Anna Truong, and Nael Zacapala. Because these writers are in sixth and seventh grade, some are teenagers while others are probably still preteens. They are best described collectively as middle-school authors.

We previously read and reviewed Pulse: Young Authors Project, another collection involving Sheila Rowe, School Express Press, and several of these same students. We gave Pulse an exceptional score of 94+/100 and described it as a fantastic collection filled with surprisingly deep, dynamic, powerful, beautiful, emotional, and thought-provoking poetry. We were astonished by that book because it did not merely succeed as a school project. Some of its strongest poems could stand alongside work written by considerably older and more experienced poets, and its imagery, symbolism, emotional maturity, structural ambition, and memorable turns of phrase repeatedly exceeded our expectations.

Naturally, that set a very high standard for Unwritten. This new collection does not consistently reach the same literary or poetic heights, but that's not to say we didn't enjoy and appreciate it. Whereas Pulse felt like an outstanding poetry collection that happened to be written by middle schoolers, Unwritten more often feels like a solid collection of middle-school poetry assignments. There is a meaningful difference between those descriptions.

Many of these selections appear to originate from familiar language-arts prompts. The “Where I’m From” format, for example, is a standard classroom exercise in which students repeat a phrase such as “I am from” while exploring their family, culture, environment, memories, traditions, and identity. We know the assignment well. We have encountered it in classrooms, written versions of it ourselves, and seen countless students use the same basic framework.

That familiarity makes some portions of Unwritten feel less fresh than the best material in Pulse, something that's compounded by the song lyrics from mainstream music that seem to pop up throughout the book, chief of which is the book's title itself, inspired by Natasha Bedingfield’s hit song of the same name. Elsewhere, a passage describing “words so innocent, yet so wrong” bears a noticeable resemblance in phrasing, rhythm, and emotional reversal to Calvin Harris’s “Summer.” We cannot know whether this similarity was intentional, and the wording is not identical, but it contributes to the broader sense that several contributors are drawing heavily from the language and construction of familiar pop songs. You could argue that kinda ads to the flavor of the book and its poems. They're inspired.

But going back to what we were saying about these looking and sounding like assignments... poems about grandparents, pets, friendship, childhood memories, nature, personal identity, and overcoming hardship can also resemble conventional assignments designed to introduce students to repetition, imagery, rhyme, metaphor, simile, and sensory description. This does not make the poems pointless, however. A familiar prompt can still produce a meaningful result, particularly when a student fills that framework with personal experiences no one else could have supplied. The assignment may be standardized, but the life inside it is not.

Daymien Carlos demonstrates this distinction particularly well. His “Where I’m From” begins with recognizable material about Arizona sunshine, religious worship, Mexican food, school, and family, but it gradually becomes far more personal. Carlos writes about having eleven siblings, two mothers, two fathers, and a biological mother who died before he had the opportunity to truly know her.

His second contribution, “Timeline,” develops these ideas into one of the book’s most memorable pieces. The poem follows the speaker from the womb through approximately age twelve, tracing parental absence, confusion, school difficulties, behavioral struggles, counseling, and the realization that the aunt and uncle raising him have effectively become his mother and father. The language is not always highly sophisticated, but the concept is excellent. Each age range reveals another layer of the speaker’s understanding.

As a small child, he wonders why his parents keep disappearing. When he enters kindergarten and hears classmates explain why they miss their mothers, he realizes that the person fulfilling that role in his own life is his aunt. Later, he reflects on having both a biological father and the uncle he now calls Dad. The poem ultimately rejects the notion that an unconventional family is somehow inferior, communicating the simple but powerful idea that being different does not mean being less.

Arlette Amaro Arias, who also appeared in Pulse, opens the student portion of Unwritten with “Dear Diary.” This is not presented as a conventional poem so much as a song, complete with verses, a breakdown, a chorus, and an outro. The speaker enters a new school feeling conspicuous and afraid, wondering whether the other students are judging her clothing and whether she will ever fit in. She eventually meets a group forming a band, unsuccessfully attempts to play guitar and drums, and then discovers an unexpected connection with the piano.

The piano becomes more than an instrument. It represents belonging, confidence, identity, and the discovery of an ability that had been waiting to emerge. The instrument effectively calls to her, turning confusion into direction and “noise into answers.” The poem’s musical structure reinforces its subject, while the diary entries create a progression through time. Arlette does not simply announce that the speaker becomes more confident. She shows that transformation unfolding across several weeks, making this an encouraging way to begin the collection.

Gage Bluestein contributes two very different poems. “Oh, My Puppy, Duke” is an affectionate and humorous portrait of life with a dog. Its structure repeatedly alternates between things Gage loves and things that irritate him. Duke curls into his lap, plays, runs, chews rocks, nibbles feet, takes too long to use the bathroom, and manipulates his owner with enormous dark eyes.

That alternating pattern gives the poem personality because real love, whether directed toward a person or an animal, includes both affection and annoyance. Duke is lovable partly because he is such a nuisance. We particularly enjoyed the description of Duke as “Bluetooth-connected to my heart.” It is a goofy, modern metaphor that sounds exactly like something a young writer might create. It is not an image we would expect from a traditional adult poet, which is precisely why it works. At the same time, a part of us still feels like this is the kind of poem someone writes when they can't think of anything else to write about in the moment. It feels like a poem someone would write when the poetry assignment is due in like an hour, and a class grade depends on it.

Gage’s “My Garden” enters more surreal territory. Silver strawberry plants, a golden goose, an owl with drumstick wings, winding paths, secret turns, and a mysterious friend named Sam create something closer to a dreamscape. The poem explicitly describes the garden as a fever dream where anything can occur.

The strongest element is the freedom of its imagination. Some images feel deliberately random, but they also capture the way children often construct private fantasy worlds without worrying whether every element follows adult logic. The garden belongs to the speaker alone, making it both a physical location and a representation of the imagination itself.

Jayde Fernandez contributes four poems, making her one of the collection’s most prolific writers. “The Whale’s Song” describes a coastal moment involving the wind, water, sand, a parent’s warning, and a whale rising from the sea. “Riding to Sunrise” offers an optimistic horseback journey through an open landscape, while “White Page” transforms creative blockage into a visual metaphor involving a painter holding a dry brush before finally finding inspiration.

“Waiting for the Bell,” however, may be the most revealing of the four, even if it is not the most poetic. The seconds feel physical, the classroom becomes stagnant, and the silent bell assumes almost mythic importance. We can practically hear generations of students cheering this poem on. At the same time, it supports one of our central criticisms: several pieces in Unwritten sound less like poems their authors desperately needed to write and more like assignments they were expected to complete. Ironically, this particular poem practically admits it.

Sofia Gonzalez is another returning contributor from Pulse, and her work contains some of the collection’s clearest philosophical ambition. “Imperfect Strength” encourages readers to accept flaws, endure temporary defeats, and recognize their ability to shape their lives. Its message is positive, although parts of it read more like motivational prose arranged into poetic lines than fully developed poetry.

“2019” is more interesting. Sofia remembers 2019 as a period of freedom, music, screens, sunsets, laughter, and carefree happiness. Because she is only in seventh grade, her nostalgia for 2019 carries a distinctly generational quality. Adults often romanticize decades from long ago, but here a young teenager is already mourning a childhood era that ended only several years earlier.
The poem recognizes that recreating the same songs, colors, conversations, and experiences would not truly bring the past back. Time changes both the world and the person remembering it. The sunsets are especially effective, appearing almost to blush while saying goodbye.

“The Weight of a Minute” may be Sofia’s strongest contribution. It explores the enormous emotional and practical possibilities contained within only sixty seconds. A minute may pass unnoticed, but it can also contain fear, courage, forgiveness, love, loss, choice, and irreversible change.

The central idea is not entirely new, but Sofia develops it thoughtfully. The poem contrasts the way a minute disappears during happiness with the way it stretches during sorrow. It ultimately argues that while people measure their lives in years, a single moment may create the dividing line between “before” and “after.” That is a sophisticated observation for a seventh-grade writer.

Jasmine Jamison’s “Apples” uses fruit as an extended metaphor for people and relationships. Some apples appear beautiful and sweet while hiding bitterness or poison beneath their surfaces. The speaker has encountered people who are wholesome, spoiled, hollow, or gone, and a rotten apple eventually becomes the emotional remnant of a damaged relationship.

The poem also surrounds the speaker with wilted roses, combining two familiar symbols of lost love. Apples and roses are not particularly unusual poetic objects, but the poem demonstrates an understanding of extended metaphor, symbolism, contrast, and sensory imagery.

Jasmine’s “Mushie” is a gentler tribute to a beloved animal. The poem remembers the pet’s round eyes, white fur, playful behavior, chewed slippers, strange sleeping positions, and companionship during storms. Its emotional center arrives when the speaker acknowledges growing older and becoming busier while still choosing to spend time with Mushie.

Nevaeh Jazo’s “Pat Childhood Memories” appears to contain a mistake in its title. We suspect “Pat” was intended to be “Past,” although we cannot state that with certainty. Despite the questionable title, the poem contains some of the collection’s strongest reflections on growing up.
Nevaeh remembers waking early, recounting dreams to her mother, visiting her grandparents, receiving green mints, playing house, hosting imaginary tea parties, and spending afternoons playing board games. In the present, she wakes later, remains in her room, sees friends primarily at school, and watches glowing screens replace imaginative play. “The mints taste like memory” is an especially effective image. Taste becomes a gateway into the past, much like a familiar smell or song can suddenly transport someone to another period of life.

The poem becomes more poignant when the speaker remembers once saying that she could not wait to grow up. Her younger self assumed that age would make life better. She did not understand that childhood laughter could become teenage sadness, or that toys and imagination would eventually be replaced by relationships, screens, distance, and emotional complications.
We also appreciated the memories of Nevaeh’s grandparents. Her grandmother provides Bible verses, while her grandfather takes her fishing and teaches her to turn a frown upside down. Problems once felt easy to solve, but growing older has made everything heavier. “Find Your People” offers a more hopeful counterpart by distinguishing biological relatives from the people who make someone feel heard, understood, safe, and accepted. The rhyme is sometimes predictable, but the poem’s sincerity is apparent.

Aria Lacchei, another returning writer, contributes two deeply personal pieces. “It Makes Me Sick” condemns students who joke about absent parents. The speaker recalls classmates asking whether her father went to buy milk and never returned, or whether he is in jail. The children making these remarks dismiss them as jokes, but the speaker carries the humiliation and pain long after their laughter has ended.

The poem is rough in places, but that roughness arguably contributes to its authenticity. It does not sound like a carefully detached adult reflecting on childhood cruelty years later. It sounds like a student who is still living through it and cannot understand why other children find someone else’s abandonment entertaining.

“I Remember” mourns a husky named Zeus. Aria recalls his fur, eyes, snoring, howling, playful nibbling, and protective presence during a storm. The poem’s emotional climax arrives when the speaker must leave her stepfather’s home and say goodbye to Zeus. The dog licks the tears from her face as she attempts to remain strong. Like several pieces in Unwritten, this poem succeeds less through elaborate literary experimentation than through concrete, personal details.

Genesis Luna Cabrera’s “Once Upon a Time, There Was Me” takes the framework of a fairy tale and gradually dismantles it. A once-happy home begins to fracture. The speaker sees her mother crying, hears parental arguments, leaves home, and eventually learns that her father had been unfaithful.

The language occasionally strains to maintain its rhyme, but the central device is effective. The repeated fairy-tale framing contrasts childhood expectations with an adult reality in which families can break apart. The conclusion does not magically repair the family. Instead, it suggests that hope and strength can survive after the fantasy has disappeared.

Genesis’s “Just Because” is a much simpler affirmation built around anaphora. The repeated phrase “Just because I’m small” challenges the assumption that a child’s size determines her ability, courage, ambition, or importance.

Amelia Maragh’s “Grandma” is a warm tribute to a loving grandmother. Amelia remembers hugs, cooking, laughter, childhood care, and songs that helped her fall asleep. The imagery of a hug feeling like jumping into clouds is sweet and age-appropriate. The poem is not revolutionary, but it does not need to be. Sometimes young writers should be allowed to preserve their love for someone in uncomplicated language.

Isabella Mendez-Higareda’s “Villain” is among the book’s more conceptually ambitious poems. The speaker rejects the label imposed upon her by someone else’s version of events. She has been turned into the villain because another person told the story first, controlled the perspective, and placed her in the shadows.

This idea speaks to a very real social experience, particularly in adolescence. Conflicts become stories, stories spread through friend groups, and the first or most persuasive narrator often determines who becomes the hero and who becomes the monster. The poem also complicates its argument by refusing to declare the speaker a hero. She describes herself as a background character trapped inside someone else’s fable.

Anger accumulates until it finally erupts, at which point the reaction is used as proof that she was the villain all along. The final accusation involving a mirror is somewhat predictable, but the poem’s central exploration of perspective, context, blame, and emotional provocation is thoughtful.

Scarlett Ortiz Martinez contributes the book’s most conventional prose narrative, “A Love Story.” July secretly loves a boy named November for years. After someone exposes her feelings, November becomes distant. A misunderstanding on Valentine’s Day appears to end any possibility of romance, but he eventually approaches her with white roses and confesses that he returns her feelings.

Naming the characters after months adds a light symbolic layer, although the story itself follows familiar romantic conventions. The ending is idealized and somewhat abrupt, but the piece captures the emotional intensity with which young people can experience crushes, embarrassment, rejection, and hope.

Scarlett’s poem “You (In My Eyes)” explores similar material from a more self-sacrificing perspective. The speaker loves someone who may love somebody else and concludes that genuine love sometimes means letting go. The poem contains familiar rhymes and sentiments, but it communicates earnest affection.

Tania Perez Martinez’s “Who Will Be There?” examines the exhaustion of always serving as everyone else’s emotional support. The speaker repairs other people’s cracks, wipes their tears, calms their fears, and remains strong when others begin to collapse. When her own world breaks, however, no one appears.

The repeated questions at the end effectively reverse the poem’s opening role. The dependable “rock” is revealed to be a person who also needs help. This is a mature and relatable subject, especially for compassionate young people who become accustomed to carrying their friends’ problems.

Angelo Quezada’s “The Creek” is a sensory nature poem. Birds, insects, tadpoles, fish, smooth rocks, lemonade, children’s laughter, rain, grass, pine needles, sunscreen, and moving water create a peaceful outdoor environment. The poem explicitly moves through seeing, smelling, hearing, and breathing, making it one of the clearest examples of a classroom exercise designed to teach sensory imagery. Angelo handles the assignment effectively, however, and the creek becomes both a playground and a refuge from noise, pressure, and confinement.

Dorothy Serafin contributes two of the collection’s darkest and most emotionally exposed poems.
“Masks” uses an extended metaphor for emotional concealment. The speaker puts on a happy face, insists that she is fine, and attempts to hide the pain underneath. The masks cling like glue while sadness, persecution, family conflict, and despair continue building.
Some metaphors compete with one another. The poem moves among masks, stains, glue, brewing ingredients, a fly trapped in a cup, and a distant star. A more experienced poet might narrow the imagery and develop fewer comparisons more deeply. Nevertheless, Dorothy clearly understands how figurative language can externalize feelings that are difficult to explain directly. The conclusion asks others not to attach their masks so permanently that their true selves can no longer breathe.

“Why?” is even more direct. Anaphora drives nearly the entire poem as Dorothy questions her relationship with her mother, a bullying brother, social media, friendship, sensitivity, unusual interests, identity, and the feeling that she cannot exist without irritating someone.
The repetition recreates a mind caught in a cycle of self-interrogation. Each answer produces another question. The speaker does not merely ask why other people mistreat her. She begins wondering whether there is something fundamentally wrong with her. The final desire to understand herself before disappearing inside those questions is affecting. This is not the collection’s most polished poem, but it may be one of its most urgent.

Anna Truong was responsible for “Love is a Sunset,” one of our favorite poems in Pulse. Her new contributions again focus heavily on affection and romantic memory. “(Un)Wanted Dreams” presents sleep as the only remaining place where a lost relationship still exists. In waking life, the other person rejects the speaker. In dreams, those cruel or dismissive statements transform into
declarations of love.

The poem repeatedly contrasts reality with dream logic. It also grounds its emotions in specific objects and memories, including a hair tie and notes passed between students. Those details prevent the poem from becoming a completely generic account of heartbreak.

The ending is especially well structured. After dwelling on the relationship, the speaker recognizes that she needed distance from love, dreams, and the person she could not release. The dream ends, and she commands herself to wake up.

“My Pair of Earrings” initially appears to concern jewelry, but the earrings become a metaphor for someone the speaker loves. She associates them with a boy who calls her, reminds her to drink water, protects her from rain, orders food when she feels shy, and shares his drinks. The comparison is unusual enough to be interesting, although it is not developed with perfect clarity. Still, Anna again demonstrates a talent for attaching emotion to specific objects.

Nael Zacapala closes the collection with three poems centered on friendship, loss, romantic pain, and emotional distress. “Until Goodbye?” describes someone whose friendship helped the speaker survive an extremely difficult period. The loss of that connection leaves him unable to separate memory from reality.

“My Girl” is more concerning. What begins as a poem about unreturned or damaged love progresses into not eating, struggling to stand, sleeplessness, taking pills to numb emotional pain, and wishing not to be awake. Because the writer is a seventh-grade student, these lines should not be treated merely as dramatic poetic flourishes.

We cannot know how autobiographical the poem is, and we should not assume that every speaker is identical to the author. Nevertheless, expressions of self-neglect, substance use, or not wanting to remain conscious deserve compassionate adult attention when they appear in student writing. A poem can be both a creative work and a possible request to be heard.

“To Isaac” turns outward again. The speaker notices another boy entering a room with reddened eyes, enduring stares, and attempting to behave as though he is unaffected. Rather than accepting that performance, the speaker recognizes the hurting child underneath it and wishes that Isaac were not in pain. That empathy is significant and gives the collection an emotionally appropriate closing note.

The emotional openness of Unwritten is its greatest strength. These young authors write about absent parents, family separation, grief, bullying, pets, grandparents, friendship, school, imagination, faith, first love, rejection, identity, and the fear of growing up. Even when the writing is ordinary, the feelings behind it frequently are not.

The collection also demonstrates a respectable variety of literary techniques. Readers will find anaphora, rhyme, simile, metaphor, extended metaphor, personification, symbolism, sensory imagery, contrast, chronological structure, repeated refrains, prose storytelling, and even song composition. Some techniques are executed more successfully than others. Rhymes can feel forced, metaphors occasionally collide, and several poems explain their messages after the imagery has already communicated them.

Capitalization and punctuation are also inconsistent. With that said, poetry often plays by unconventional rules (or a lack of rules).

The presentation is one of the book’s strengths. Most students receive an introductory page with their name, grade, photograph, and a quotation, adding tremendous personality to the anthology. Seeing the writers reminds us that these are real children expressing real pieces of their lives. 

The collection would be stronger with a table of contents, a clearer introductory explanation of the Young Authors Project, and perhaps brief context about the prompts or process behind the poems. Knowing which pieces came from assigned forms and which arose independently would help readers evaluate their intentions more fairly.

We also wonder whether the young writers revised their poems after receiving feedback. Revision is where promising student writing often becomes genuinely powerful. Several pieces contain excellent central ideas that could reach another level through tighter language, more selective imagery, stronger line breaks, and the removal of unnecessary explanation.

That is ultimately what separates Unwritten from Pulse. Pulse repeatedly astonished us with poems that felt complete, refined, and memorable. Unwritten contains flashes of that same ability, particularly in “Timeline,” “The Weight of a Minute,” “Pat Childhood Memories,” “It Makes Me Sick,” “Villain,” “Masks,” “Why?,” and “(Un)Wanted Dreams.” However, the collection as a whole is more average from a literary standpoint. It is expressive rather than consistently exceptional.

That may sound harsh when discussing children’s writing, but meaningful encouragement does not require pretending every student work is a masterpiece. Young authors deserve to be taken seriously, and taking them seriously includes recognizing both what they have accomplished and where their craft can continue to grow.

Besides, “average” poetry written by sixth- and seventh-grade students can still represent an enormous achievement. These writers completed their pieces, revised them to some degree, shared personal parts of themselves, appeared in a professionally produced book, and became published authors before many adults have written a complete page. That matters.

The title Unwritten is fitting because none of these writers has reached the end of their story. Their identities are developing, their voices are changing, and their relationships are beginning, ending, or transforming. Some are still discovering what subjects matter to them, while others are beginning to understand how poetry can turn confusion into language. Their futures are still unwritten, and so is much of their best work.

Unwritten: Young Authors Project may not reach the remarkable literary heights of Pulse, but it remains a sincere, expressive, emotionally revealing, and worthwhile collection. It provides these students with something many aspiring writers never receive: the opportunity to see their names, photographs, ideas, and words preserved inside a real published book. More importantly, it tells them that their voices are worth hearing.

We recommend Unwritten to families, educators, school libraries, poetry teachers, youth-writing organizations, and anyone interested in the inner lives of young people. It is not an outstanding poetry collection in quite the same way as its predecessor, but it is an outstanding opportunity for its contributors. Perhaps this collection is not supposed to represent the greatest poetry these students will ever write. Perhaps it is only the first page.

Check it out on Amazon!