Parisa Akhbari Combines Poetry and Prose in LGQBT YA Novel 'Just Another Epic Love Poem'

In Just Another Epic Love Poem, writer and mental health therapist, Parisa Akhbari, presents a coming-of-age, young adult romance novel about two best friends and the bond that connects them as they navigate their last year of high school together. Told in both prose and poetry, the girls also have the added stress of dealing with challenging family relationships, figuring out what to do with the rest of their lives, and understanding the emotional changes happening between them. As Akhbari explains, “Just Another Epic Love Poem picks up at senior year for the main character, Mitra, after she has moved to a Catholic school for five years and been in this environment where she feels pretty confined and pretty isolated, and the one person that she has connected to and who has become her best friend and her world is Bea, and the two of them have bonded over their love of poetry, so they’ve been writing this epic poem back and forth between the two of them over the course of those 5 years… they pick up on the word that the last person ended on, so it has this, sort of, endless quality between the two of them… as Mitra and Bea are looking ahead to their futures, Mitra is recognizing that she’s fallen in love with Bea… so the book gets to follow the story of how Mitra and Bea’s relationship changes, how the poem changes, and how their lives change as they fall in love and as they prepare to head out into the world, and as other family dynamics and family relationships change around them.”

When Akhbari first began writing, she had a different vision of how her story would turn out. “I, at the beginning, did not expect that this would be a romance… but, I thought of it as more of a heartbreak story and I think over time, that shifted and it’s not a traditional romance in the sense that I think a lot of romance novels follow a certain trajectory, and this is a little different. There is quite a bit more coming-of-age and family relationships that are a part of the story… but it is much closer to a romance than I thought it would be at the beginning, and I think what changed was a conversation with myself, and my editor, and agent about what would be hopeful and optimistic for young people right now, and what might really convey the message I wanted to get across, which is that vulnerability can feel like a risky thing, but it’s also a thing that brings you closer to your connections with other people. So, I’m happy with where we ended up.”