Kwame Alexander, author of The Crossover, has launched a new imprint for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt aimed at showcasing books that are a little bit different.

When Alexander was trying to sell The Crossover, a story about two high school-aged star basketball players told in verse, he got a lot of push back. He was told boys wouldn’t read poetry and girls wouldn’t read about sports.

Obviously, those people were wrong. HMH took a chance on the author, who became an instant best seller. Now, HMH is giving Alexander his own imprint, so he can support stories like his — those which others might think aren’t commercial enough.

According to the New York Times, we can expect the following books out of the Versify Imprint:

The first batch of books from Versify reflects Mr. Alexander’s eclectic taste and broad ambitions. The inaugural spring 2019 list includes Kip Wilson’s “White Rose,” a young adult Holocaust novel written in verse, which tells the true story of the Nazi resistance leader Sophie Scholl; “Vamos!/Let’s Go!” the first in a new bilingual picture book series by the illustrator Raul Gonzalez, who publishes as Raul the Third; “This Is For Us,” a picture book featuring a poem by Mr. Alexander that looks at African-American history through the lens of sports and culture, with illustrations by Kadir Nelson, and Lamar Giles’ “The Last Last-Day-of-Summer,” a middle grade fantasy novel about two cousins in Virginia who accidentally freeze time, inspired partly by Norton Juster’s “The Phantom Tollbooth.”

In case you haven’t picked up on it from the name of the imprint (or Alexander’s previous work), the author has a thing for verse.

This isn’t the only imprint formed recently that focuses on diversifying the book world.

In September 2016, we learned that Percy Jackson author Rick Riordan would be helming his own imprint as well, called Rick Riordan Presents, which would highlight mythological stories from around the world, told by diverse voices.

The first book to be presented by Rick Riordan is Aru Shah and the End of Time by Roshani Chokshi, which will hit shelves on March 27. You can rest assured we’ll be reviewing it here at Hypable.

An editor over at Disney-Hyperion celebrated the fact that another imprint aims at diversifying voices in young adult literature, which Riordan himself retweeted.

Are you excited for Kwame Alexander’s new imprint, Versify?