The article presents a discussion of the potential of young adult urban fiction to engage at‐risk and incarcerated students in literacy instruction. The author provides an overview of the genre and an analysis of why young adult urban fiction is a good choice for educational use with at‐risk and incarcerated teens. The author also offers an evaluative process for selecting the best young adult urban fiction to use with these populations, and she shares some instructional ideas, including a list of books that met her evaluative criteria in her survey of 100 young adult urban fiction titles.

The American cultural and political landscape has seen changes on the level of seismic shifts in the past four decades, thanks in part to the two very diverse fields of big business and biotechnology. Linking the two arenas together in the literary landscape is a growing body of young adult science fiction that envisions a future shaped profoundly by both. This paper surveys how the interplay between corporations and biotechnology is represented in this emerging body of work to explore diverse facets of a common theme: the biotechnical subjection of human matter to market force.