Please help.

The school I teach at is applying for International Baccalaureate (IB) certification, which means we need to develop a curriculum with set boundaries but plenty of choice within those boundaries. For example, for world literature classes, IB has published a (quite extensive) list of pre-approved texts from all over the world, and we can choose any authors and poets we want as long as they appear on that list.

Our objective is a curriculum diverse in terms of the ethnicities, nationalities, languages, genders, classes, and concerns of the authors it represents. The problem is that most of us, myself included, are extremely well versed in Western European literature–and not much else.

I am one of two people responsible for finalizing and documenting the English curriculum, which means I have considerable power over what high school students at our school will read and study in the next several years. I don’t want to squander this opportunity to change things for the better, but I’m afraid that without your help I will.

If you can think of any author or text from any corner of the world that might appeal to high school students and deserves to be mandatory reading, please, please, let me know. I especially need poetry recommendations, but anything will be welcome. I am too ignorant to do this alone.