2014 has seen a lot of talk about the value of young adult literature. In Slate, Ruth Graham said that adults should be ashamed of reading it; and recently, the popularity of YA popped up in A.O. Scott’s sort-of lament on the death of adulthood.

In the midst of all this, the longlist for the National Book Award for young people’s literature was announced, and as I looked at the list of nominees, it quickly became apparent that YA’s detractors are flat wrong. The incredible range of human experience represented by the titles on the list is simply astonishing, and, in some ways, puts adult literature to shame.

This year’s longlist includes a few titles engaging with current events and issues—like Laurie Halse Anderson’s The Impossible Knife of Memory, about a girl whose father has PTSD from time spent in Iraq, and Gail Giles’ Girls Like Us, about graduates of a high school special ed program who enter adulthood together. There are interesting exercises in genre, including Kate Milford’s Greenglass House, a clever mystery, and Noggin, a bizarre little story with sci-fi elements about a boy whose severed head is reattached to someone else’s body. These are just a few of the titles on the list of nominees, which speaks to the astonishing range of the excellent work coming out of the YA category.

There’s also Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming, which is my pick for the book that should and perhaps will win the prize. Brown Girl Dreaming is a memoir told in verse, about the author’s experiences growing up as an African American in the 1960s and 70s. In the New York Times, reviewer Veronica Chambers compared it to the work of Nikki Giovanni:

I suspect this book will be to a generation of girls what Giovanni’s book was to mine: a history lesson, a mash note passed in class, a book to read burrowed underneath the bed covers and a life raft during long car rides when you want to float far from wherever you are, and wherever you’re going, toward the person you feel destined to be.

Brown Girl Dreaming is short enough to read in a single sitting, but the poems will stick with you much longer than that. The book—and the others on the NBA’s longlist—is proof that young adult readers are not blind consumers flocking to the latest trend, and that youth is not a marketing category: it’s a part of human experience that fuels great art, and that when plumbed with intelligence and empathy benefits all readers, old and young alike.