Mel Glenn is a teacher and writer whose special knack lies with his keen ability to portray the everyday concerns and challenges of teenagers. As Glenn stated to Jeffrey Copeland in Speaking of Poets, "I'm a writer because I am a teacher. If I weren't a teacher, I couldn't get near the stories I write about." Glenn's poems, written in free verse and simple language, "reach out to adolescents, even those who are not ordinarily readers of poetry," Teri S. Lesesne remarked in Twentieth-Century Young Adult Writers. Lesesne added that Glenn's work "highlights the trials and tribulations, the angst and anxiety, and the joys and wonders of adolescence."

Born in Switzerland, Glenn and his family moved to the United States in 1945, his father already a U.S. citizen. His father, a doctor, also wrote a medical column for a Yiddish paper in New York. Glenn's first real writing...