Jacqueline Woodson is an award-winning writer of fiction and verse for young adults. She has said that she chose to write in verse because it allows her to express the emotions of her characters more effectively than prose does. In an interview with The Horn Book, she explained:
I tend to think in images, and when I’m writing in verse, those images can stay intact on the page, rather than getting lost in the flow of prose. Also, there’s something about the way a poem looks on a page — all those white spaces — that seems more inviting than a big block of text. It encourages readers to slow down and really savor the language.