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Meet Author Jason Reynolds

Photo: Author Jason Reynolds. Credit: Ben Fractenberg.

Jason Reynolds was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Oxon Hill, Maryland. He wasn’t into reading or writing as a boy, but that changed when he discovered his love for the lyrics and flow of Hip Hop. “It was through rap music and the discovery of rap lyrics that I found my path and my way into the world of poetry,” he said in the Kennedy Center interview. “And that poetry evolved over the course of ten, fifteen years into a way for me to tell my own stories.”

Like the main character in his book  Long Way Down , Reynolds says he and his friends faced an important decision. “When I was 19, a friend of mine was murdered,” Reynolds said in a recent interview with The Guardian . “That night my friends and I went to his mom’s house and we were all planning to figure out who did this to him so we could exact revenge. So we could murder the man who murdered our friend. And I just remember the pain – the pain of the lost friend but also the pain of meeting a part of myself that I didn’t know existed. A part of myself that could lose control to the point where I could commit a murder. That’s a very human thing.” The mother of the dead friend talked Reynolds and his friends out of retaliating, saying no other mother should ever have to feel like she did at that moment.

Reynolds is now an award-winning, internationally-celebrated author of young adult books. Titles include When I Was the Greatest , Ghost , The Boy in the Black Suit , and As Brave as You . He has also written the Marvel Comics novel Miles Morales: Spider-Man and co-authored All American Boys with Brendan Kiely.

Below, watch a 2018 interview with Reynolds captured during the Kennedy Center's stage adaptation premiere of Long Way Down .

The Writing of Jason Reynolds

Author Jason Reynolds explains that  Long Way Down  was originally written in prose, but he eventually shifted the novel to free verse. Free verse is a poetic form, but one without rigid rhymes, rhythm, or structure; it may play with words up and down and across the page. It is effective for streamlining language and condensing emotion in powerful ways. In  Long Way Down , he used free verse to create a sense of urgency, discomfort, and disorientation. Reynolds felt his “60-second story” would be more believable if written in poetry than in prose. “When experiencing trauma, the brain is not working in complete sentences,” he says. “I wanted to put the brain on the page.”

Long Way Down  was adapted into a play from the free-verse novel by Jason Reynolds. It takes place in an unnamed neighborhood of an unnamed city where many members are confronting loss.

The book and play are about a boy facing extraordinary circumstances, Reynolds says. In an interview with the Kennedy Center, he described the character’s dilemma this way: “Will has to make a really difficult decision because he comes from a community…where there are codes; there are rules and ecosystems that must be followed. And so he has to figure out and to choose whether or not he’s going to follow the rules [of his community], and one of those rules is, unfortunately, to avenge his brother’s death.”

The play follows Will’s experience as he struggles with this choice. Will he follow those rules that have been handed down to him? Or make new ones for himself? Reynolds emphasizes such codes of behavior exist in every community—well-off or under-resourced, from cities to suburbs to small towns.

So how does Will’s decision-making play out in  Long Way Down ? The book and the play intentionally leave Will’s final decision unstated and does not herd the audience toward any one conclusion about what he should or shouldn’t do. Instead, it challenges us to sort through and connect the perspectives, the feelings, and circumstances to present an open-ended question for us to weigh: After all his experiences on the long way down, what choice will this teenage boy make?

Here’s an example from the book, using both the freedom of free verse and shape poetry to signal a key moment.

AT THE ELEVATOR

Back already sore. Uncomfortable. Gun strapped like a brick rubbing my skin raw with each step.

See like time stood still as I reached out and pushed the button.

White light surrounded the black arrow.

DOWN DOWN DOWN

Jason Reynolds on PBS News Hour. Dec. 15, 2017.

“How poetry can help kids turn a fear of literature into love.” Reynolds on finding genuine joy in reading lit that speaks to you and your experience.

Interview with Jason Reynolds. Build. Oct. 25, 2017.

Reynolds discusses his career and writing process—a great watch for anyone interested in the literary arts and what it takes to become a writer.

Use Your Words and Art

Inspiring young people to write, as well as read, is part of Jason Reynolds’s life mission. He urges everyone to express their lives in words and art, whatever form that takes—prose, poetry, song lyrics, comics, anything at all. “The greatest gift [young writers] have is the voice that feels most natural,” he says. Not sure how to start? Watch for striking images and listen for powerful phrases from your own life and experience, then write them down. Here are some other ideas to help you practice capturing your own life in words:

Anagrams are word puzzles.  They involve rearranging letters of a word or phrase to create a new word or words, with all the letters being used once. Anagrams appear in the play, such as in one instance when Will rearranges the letters for "ocean" to create "canoe." Will's anagrams offer clues about his thoughts and the action in the play.

Here are a few words for you and your friends to anagram:

listen drawer past rules friend discern verse assume

(Answers: listen: enlist, silent, tinsel; drawer: reward, redraw, warder, warred; past: spat, taps, pats; rules: lures; friend: finder; discern: rescind, cinders; verse: serve, sever, veers; assume: amuses)

What other words can you think of that are anagrams? Also, think about how the different words of an anagram may be related in interesting ways. For example, Will makes the connection between “ocean” and its anagram “canoe.”

Claiming Personal Power

Ideas and resources to help when you want to add your personal power to the company of others.

Get Your Write On

A handful of online resources to link you up with others working on their writing.

Dealing with Trauma

Some resources to help with dealing with traumatic stress.

Free verse can be a graceful way to capture experience in tight, meaning-packed language.  It often emphasizes the senses to connect quickly and intensely with readers. Consider the following phrases and similes from the Long Way Down (page numbers in parentheses):

a headlock that felt like a hug (p. 45)

the pistol under my pillow like a lost tooth (p. 60)

the stench of death and sweat trapped in the cotton like fish grease (p. 65)

A jagged mouth, sharp and sharklike (p. 79)

the cigarette dangling, bouncing with each word like a fishing pole with fish on bait, with hook through head (p. 132)

Sadness split his face like cold breeze on chapped lip after attempting to smile (p. 165)

Use sensory detail along with your memory and imagination to write two or more moments like these. There is no right or wrong, good or bad; there is just what you feel and know. If it helps, think about what stories are important to you—about aspects of your life, the people you know, and the community and world around you. Imagine how to describe snapshots of those things and ideas, then write!

Jason Reynolds says we are all “haunted by something.” He means there are experiences in our lives that we can’t seem to leave behind—a death, a lost love, a memory of perfect happiness. These moments trigger deep feelings—sometimes of comfort, sometimes of heartache. Write a story or narrative about what haunts you or someone you have known. You might even borrow from  Long Way Down  and envision an encounter or conversation with others who can share other perspectives on whatever or whomever is doing the haunting. Inject sensory detail to help your writing come alive.

Sean McCollum

Lisa Resnick

Tiffany A. Bryant Kenny Neal

October 6, 2021

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Who Jason Reynolds Writes His Best-sellers For

By Rumaan Alam

Jason Reynolds, the author of many best-selling books for children and young adults, likes to tell certain stories to audiences at his events. One is about the Black girl who asked Reynolds, who is also Black, if he ever wished that his skin were a different color. (“Absolutely not,” his response began, “and here is why we have every reason to be proud, despite the pain.”) Another story features his aunt, who tried in vain to interest eight-year-old Jason in classic books like “Treasure Island,” “Little Women,” and “Moby-Dick.” (The bygone worlds of these books “didn’t make any sense,” according to Reynolds. “I wanted to read about the ice-cream truck.”) He often discloses that he never read a book from beginning to end until he was seventeen: it was Richard Wright’s landmark “ Black Boy ,” from 1945, which snared him with its shocking opening (a little boy about to burn down his grandmother’s house) and its depiction of a childhood he recognized. Occasionally, fielding a question he’s been asked many times, he listens attentively, pauses, breathes deeply, and says, “All right, here’s the truth.”

His ability to connect his own experiences with those of the young people he writes for, and to address his readers with patience and respect, has made him a superstar in the world of children’s lit. Since 2014, Reynolds has published thirteen books, which have sold more than six million copies. “ Look Both Ways ,” from 2019, was a finalist for the National Book Award and won Britain’s Carnegie Medal, one of the most prestigious prizes for children’s writing. Last year, the Library of Congress named Reynolds the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, a two-year appointment that has beamed him into schools, libraries, and book festivals around the country. (The coronavirus pandemic turned a planned tour into a series of virtual events.)

Reynolds’s young protagonists are Black. Sometimes they are comfortably middle class, if not quite “Cosby Show” genteel; sometimes they lead lives touched by crime or poverty, their families fractured by divorce or incarceration. The books provide neither role models nor cautionary tales, and they are written in a hip-hop-inflected teen argot—Reynolds’s interactions with kids keep his references fresh. The “Track” quartet of novels, about a rag-tag track-and-field team, consists of four discrete coming-of-age stories that form a collective document of contemporary urban Black life. In “ As Brave as You ,” a stand-alone novel from 2016, two brothers from New York City, Genie and Ernie, spend a summer with their grandparents in rural Virginia so that their parents can repair their faltering marriage. (“They were ‘having problems,’ which Genie knew was just parent-talk for maybe/possibly/probably divorcing. . . . When his mother first told him about the ‘problems,’ all Genie could think about was what his friend Marshé Brown told him when her parents got divorced, and how she never saw her father again.”)

The books are both frank and age-appropriate. In the young-adult novels, a boy might fret about when he will lose his virginity; elementary-school-age readers will find stories of chaste romance or school-cafeteria politics, leavened with potty humor. Reynolds’s imperative, always, is to entertain his readers. “What’s going to stop them from picking up their phone?” he said. “What’s going to stop them from turning on a two-minute YouTube clip? I got to make that same stimuli happen on a page.”

In March, 2020, Reynolds published “ Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You ,” an adaptation for young readers of Ibram X. Kendi’s “ Stamped from the Beginning ,” the National Book Award-winning study of the invention of race and racism. It appeared just before the murder of George Floyd , in Minneapolis, which led to nationwide protests against police brutality. An explicitly political work of nonfiction, “Stamped” was a departure from Reynolds’s previous books, but it preserved the writer’s vernacular style: “Before we begin, let’s get something straight,” he writes. “This is not a history book. I repeat, this is not a history book. At least not like the ones you’re used to reading in school.”

Jacqueline Woodson, the MacArthur-winning writer who preceded Reynolds as National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, described his novels as conversations with his young readers. The dynamic he fosters is not the same as the one between a student and the canon—the value of the great books we are assigned in school is held as inviolable, yet they are generally indifferent to the lived realities of readers. Reynolds “is telling the reader that he sees them,” Woodson told me. “This is the life he knows, the world he knows, and it’s the truth, and therefore it’s legit.”

Reynolds is six feet three, with dreadlocks he hasn’t cut in years. He favors black jeans and black tees, offset by statement sneakers. He lives in a narrow town house in Washington, D.C., that is full of orderly clutter; its walls are lined with contemporary art work by Bisa Butler, a portraitist who uses African and African American textile and quilting techniques, and Fahamu Pecou, who is known for his bold, intensely colorful paintings of Black men. Reynolds’s collection also includes mid-century West African photographs of young couples, dazzlingly dressed, kissing or holding hands, and family artifacts, such as the unfinished pack of cigarettes that was in his grandfather’s pocket when he died, framed behind glass. This year, Reynolds appeared on PBS’s “Antiques Roadshow” with a typewritten letter from Langston Hughes, signed in green ink.

Born in 1983, Reynolds grew up in Oxon Hill, a Maryland suburb of D.C. that was hit hard by the AIDS and crack epidemics. He remembered his neighborhood as “an all-Black community, dealing with all the things—you just happen to have a yard.” He spoke of both of his parents with awe. His father, Allen, who had an older daughter and son from previous relationships, was the parent who handled breakfast and school drop-off. He was big on hugs and kisses, but also impossibly cool: “My father was covered in tons of tattoos, gold chains, he rode motorcycles, he had guitars and tight pants and the whole thing, right?”

Allen spent part of Reynolds’s childhood attaining his doctorate in psychology, while Reynolds’s mother, Isabell, assumed the role of household manager. “I thought my mom had all the money, because we never went without food. But that’s because she understood how to use coupons, she understood how to buy things off-season. We had a house, you know what I mean? If you pull up, if you go around the corner, you might meet somebody who has a lot less. But it didn’t matter, because we all live in the same neighborhood.” His mother looked out for others. “She had the neighborhood house. She fed everybody, she made sure everybody was taken care of,” he said.

When Reynolds was ten years old, his parents split up. He didn’t foresee the divorce, and he felt betrayed by the collapse of what he had believed to be a happy family. He grew distant from his father, who remarried and eventually had another son.

Reynolds was an indifferent student: “I was playing video games, playing basketball, running around, trying to figure out where the party was.” Because he skipped second grade, he completed high school at sixteen, and enrolled at the University of Maryland. While an undergraduate, he performed as a spoken-word poet, and the experience still informs his rhetorical style: seemingly improvisatory, colloquial, disarming, with an ever-shifting tempo. He became friendly with another student, Jason Griffin, who persuaded him to move to New York after graduation and collaborate on a book, “ My Name Is Jason. Mine Too.: Our Story. Our Way .,” which blended Reynolds’s inspirational verse with Griffin’s graffiti-inflected illustrations. Released in 2009 by HarperCollins, it was a commercial failure. “When you’re twenty-one years old and you land a publishing deal, you believe that you’re destined for greatness,” Reynolds said. “It’s a dangerous thing to believe.” (The Jasons remain the best of friends. Next year, they’ll publish “Ain’t Burned All the Bright,” which gives a teen-ager’s perspective on the upheavals of 2020.)

Reynolds moved back to D.C. and took a gig as a stock boy at Lord & Taylor, the only work he could find in the job market of the Great Recession. For the first time in years, he turned to his father for help. Allen Reynolds was running a mental-health clinic in Maryland’s Calvert County, and he pulled strings to secure a job for his son as a caseworker at an affiliated agency. Jason, who had no experience or qualifications for the work, was given a PalmPilot and twenty-seven clients, whose conditions included schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, drug addiction, and Tourette’s syndrome. He didn’t last long: he was beset by anxiety and lost forty pounds. Still, he and his father became close again, and remained so until Allen’s death last year. The experience also proved essential to Jason’s work as a writer. “You never really know how human you are until you sit in the driver’s seat and there’s a man who has committed murder sitting in the passenger seat, and you like him—a lot,” he told me. “Or there’s a man who’s done some heinous things to children, and your job, despite how you feel about what he’s done, is to get him housing and food, because he’s still a person. The ability to humanize the vilified was a gift for me.”

After he quit the caseworker job, Reynolds returned to New York, living in Brooklyn and selling clothes at a Rag & Bone boutique in Nolita. (A well-worn pair of Rag & Bone jeans hangs in a frame beside Reynolds’s desk. “It’s a reminder,” he said, grinning. “Get to work, or you’re going back there.”) On the sales floor, he worked on a handwritten draft of what became his first novel, “When I Was the Greatest,” which came out in 2014. The book’s teen-age narrator, Ali, has a friend with Tourette’s syndrome and an estranged father who has cycled in and out of jail. Early in the story, Ali recalls a boxing lesson he took at age six: the trainer, Malloy, urges the child to pretend a punching bag is his dad, who is in jail. Ali unclenches his fist and hugs the bag as though it were a person. Malloy tells him, “You love first, and that’s always a good thing.” Years later, when Ali needs the right outfit for a party he’s sneaking out to, he asks his father for help. His dad comes through with designer clothes, possibly stolen, for Ali and his friends. When Ali runs afoul of some local toughs, he again seeks counsel from his father, who makes peace on his behalf.

“ When I Was the Greatest ” does not draw directly on Reynolds’s relationship with his own father. (“It’s not that he was absent—it’s that I did not want him around when I was young,” he said.) But their cycles of intimacy and estrangement provide some of the emotional groundwater of the book and its portrayal of a fatherless household. In all of his novels, Reynolds borrows liberally from reality, fictionalizing his own life and the lives of friends and family. “This is all true,” he often says. “These are all my personal stories.” The question of what to write, he said, is premised on locating a shared emotional truth with his reader: “If I feel it, other people feel it too, right?”

In April of this year, Reynolds paid a virtual visit to students at Coalinga Middle School, in central California, from his sunny home office. His oversized Library of Congress medal was conspicuous hanging from his neck. He explained his role as the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature: “What I’m supposed to do is encourage all the young people to read and write, right?” He continued, “If my teen-age homie don’t like to read, and I show up and I’m, like, ‘Hey, I know you don’t like reading, but guess what I’m getting ready to tell you? You got to read,’ they’re going to say . . . ‘No.’ That doesn’t work.”

Rather than arguing on behalf of books, Reynolds proselytizes about narrative. Storytelling, he contends, is a means of reflecting, comprehending, and validating the self, which is more important than an education in the classics. (In a 2019 video for the Scholastic publishing company, called “The Power of Story,” Reynolds says, “I’m actually not even sure that I’ve seen myself in a book as of yet. . . . You name me one contemporary fiction novel about a thirty-five-year-old heterosexual Black man. But they don’t exist. It’s not a thing. I’m still invisible. I was invisible when I was a kid and I’m invisible as an adult.”) Addressing the Coalinga students, Reynolds said, “Let’s talk about you and the stories that you have, right?” He gestured at the bookcases behind him. Young people are told “that these are the important stories, these are the ones that are going to make them whole and make them smart and make them this, that, and the third. But really they’ve got their own stories, their own narratives.”

A seventh grader named Sean asked him about the inspiration for “ Ghost ” (2016), the opening novel in the “Track” series, which is centered on a sprinter named Castle. The first time we see Castle running, it’s not during a race—he and his mother are escaping his father, who is wielding a gun. Reynolds explained that the scene was drawn from the life of a friend. “We’re more than our traumatic moments,” he told the students. “We have just as many triumphs as we do trauma.”

Most students ask Reynolds the same handful of questions: what inspires him, what sports he loved as a kid. He has made an art of not quite answering, so that they tell him instead about their basketball practice or favorite video games. He has an easy, natural manner with kids, speaking to them not as an authority figure but, rather, as a co-conspirator. He insists that all questions are fair game, sometimes to the dismay of the teachers or librarians in attendance. Does he know any famous people? (“Y’all are cooler than them, that’s for sure.”) Is he rich? (“So, there’s nothing wrong with being rich as long as you understand what that money is for—making sure your family is good, right?”)

In June, I watched Reynolds with students from Arundel High School, in Maryland. He contorted his frame to peer into the screen, approximated eye contact by staring into the camera’s green light, and fiddled with a pencil as he committed the kids’ names to memory, then recited them back. I heard a lighter timbre than usual in his laugh. Later, I spoke with Bunmi Omisore, a seventeen-year-old then in her junior year, who was in the audience. She discovered Reynolds’s books in elementary school. “I spent a lot of time at the library, just because it was free and you can be there from 9 A . M . to 9 P . M .,” she said. “It’s kind of hard, especially if you’re into young-adult novels, to find ones that have Black main characters who actually talk like Black people or who aren’t going through a traumatic event.”

The idea of fiction as mirror is important to Omisore. “I want to be the main character,” she said. More pressingly, she looks for books that distill quotidian Black experience. “You need stories to not only prove to Black readers that they have an identity outside of Blackness but to prove that to white readers. Because a lot of my white teachers and classmates, their perception of the Black experience is so warped, because all they come into contact with are books of struggle and pain.”

Reynolds’s books neither center on pain nor ignore it; they understand it as an aspect of life. In “ Patina ” (2017), one of the “Track” novels, the title character is a twelve-year-old girl whose biological mother has lost her legs to diabetes and cannot care for her children. Patina is profoundly affected by this, but she is still consumed by the rites of girlhood, like braiding hair and negotiating competitive friendships. In “Ghost,” Castle is almost killed by his father, but the book is more interested in the boy’s building of bonds with his teammates or navigating dilemmas of conscience, as when he decides to steal a pair of running shoes. “I knew that I could just ask my mother to get them for me,” Castle thinks, “and she would because she felt like this track thing was gonna keep me out of trouble. But when I saw how much they cost . . . I just couldn’t ask her for them. I just couldn’t.” The moral complexity of the moment is characteristic of Reynolds’s work: Castle’s act is motivated at once by base material desire and by his love for his mother. Like many of Reynolds’s protagonists, Castle is the hero of his story, but his creator doesn’t give him the burden of being heroic.

There are good and less good fathers in Reynolds’s fiction, but the mothers get more of his love. It’s not that his mothers are sainted or simplistic, but rather that the attention he pays to them captures the fervor of a child’s feeling for a parent. In “Ghost,” Castle is shaken to learn that a teammate’s mother died giving birth to him. “My mother isn’t always the happiest lady on earth, but that’s just because times have been tough. But I’d rather have tough times with her than no times at all. Sunny ain’t never even met his mom. Never even had her cooking, and all moms can cook (when they’re not too tired).” In “ The Boy in the Black Suit ” (2015), the protagonist, Matt, takes a job at a funeral home after the death of his mother. At night, Matt soothes himself to sleep with repeat plays of Tupac Shakur’s “Dear Mama,” a paean to maternal love: “I laid on my back with my earbuds in and that song on repeat, staring up into the darkness, imagining there was no ceiling, or roof, or clouds, until there really was no ceiling or walls, and I was no longer in my small bedroom, but instead in some strange dream.”

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Reynolds told me that, during the question-and-answer session at his Library of Congress inauguration, in January, 2020, a little boy piped up: “What’s your most favorite thing to do with your mother?” (Included in Reynolds’s Twitter bio: “I love my mama. And I love you. Unless you don’t love my mama. Then we got problems.”) After the ceremony, the boy tracked him down. Reynolds went on, “Then he says, ‘Because me and my mother, we go on this vacation every year.’ He wanted to tell me about this, publicly, in front of his friends, this little Black boy from D.C.—‘I want to tell you about the things that I love to do with my mother.’ ”

In June, I had lunch with Reynolds and his mother at a steak house in D.C. Isabell, who is in her seventies, described her son as a boy who would speak up on behalf of others. “If we were out to eat and his brother would want something, when the waitress came by—‘Excuse me, excuse me. Could my brother have some more?’ ”

“My older brother,” Reynolds added.

Isabell spent her entire career at the same insurance company, simultaneously studying part time at the University of the District of Columbia; it took her years to earn her degree, in education. Her son’s bedtime routine included the affirmation “I can do anything.” She told me, “I instilled that in him when he was just a little thing—he could barely say his prayers.” She turned to Reynolds. “I think that sort of got into you.”

Reynolds mentioned a time, years ago, when he complained to her of being tired and she said, “You know, son, sometimes I look at you and I feel bad, because I made you a machine.” He still marvels at how frankly she spoke to him when he was a teen-ager, especially about sex: “What are you doing? How are you doing it? Let’s get into the nitty-gritty of it so I can make sure you’re being safe and responsible. Let’s talk about the girls. Let’s talk about drugs. Let’s talk about anything.” He told me, “Everything I know about being a man came from a woman.”

Walter Dean Myers, a novelist for young readers and a previous National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, wrote a damning Op-Ed for the Times in 2014, months before his death, about the lack of Black characters in literature for children. Myers was a voracious reader into his teens—Shakespeare, Balzac, Joyce—but, he wrote, “as I discovered who I was, a black teenager in a white-dominated world, I saw that these characters, these lives, were not mine. . . . What I wanted, needed really, was to become an integral and valued part of the mosaic that I saw around me.” Reynolds’s first novel was published that year, and it’s tempting—but reductive—to view his body of work as an ongoing response to the question posed in Myers’s editorial: “Where are black children going to get a sense of who they are and what they can be?”

Parents and educators rely on books to teach the alphabet or how to use the toilet; they make narratives out of shoe-tying or learning to share. I’m the father of two boys, both Black. My husband is white and I’m South Asian, so neither of us can offer a firsthand model of Black selfhood to our children. I’m perhaps too dependent on books to assist in this. Shortly after we adopted our older son, Simon, I bought Ezra Jack Keats’s legendary picture books, all featuring the same adorable Black boy: “ The Snowy Day ,” “ Whistle for Willie ,” “ Peter’s Chair .” Simon always preferred stories about cars and trucks.

My sons’ shelves are filled with picture books that they’ve long outgrown, but I keep them on hand because they feature Black children. If you’re choosing books based on the presence of Black faces, you’ll end up with a lot of biographies of civil-rights leaders and tales about slavery. My household has plenty of these, but our favorite books are about the small stuff of childhood: “ Crown: An Ode to the Fresh Cut ,” by Derrick Barnes, about Black boys visiting the barbershop, or “ Green Pants ,” by Kenneth Kraegel, about a kid and his favorite item of clothing.

Reynolds wants to show his readers something they will recognize. “I write to Black children,” he said, “but I write for all children.” He is vocal about his love of his own Blackness and sees that as the essential political stance of his fiction. “My characters are not actually concerned about white people,” he said. “I think I can count on one hand the number of white people that exist in my books. The way that I’m addressing race is by creating Black worlds.”

An exception is “ All American Boys, ” published in 2015 and co-written with Brendan Kiely, a white writer of young-adult novels. He and Reynolds met when they were both on a book tour in 2014. “Jason told me about how his mother called him and said, in so many words, ‘Jason, you’re travelling around the country—I’m worried that there might be a George Zimmerman out there,’ ” Kiely recalled. “And I was thinking about how my mother didn’t call me. There’s no reason for my mother, who’s white, to call her white son and have that same fear.” The book alternates between the perspectives of Rashad, a Black high schooler attacked by police after a false accusation of shoplifting, and Quinn, a white classmate who witnesses the assault. The novel examines racism and police misconduct but is cannily designed not to offend: Rashad is a middle-class R.O.T.C. kid whose own father was once a cop. “All American Boys” is a boon to librarians and teachers who want to provide young readers with stories that illuminate what they see in the headlines. “We knew this book was going to be perennial, that it would continue to be relevant because of the state of the country,” Reynolds told me. It has been one of his most successful books, selling eight hundred thousand copies to date.

Every year, the American Library Association publishes its list of “Top 10 Most Challenged Books”—those that people most frequently demand to have removed from schools and libraries in the U.S. Despite its measured exploration of a complicated subject, “All American Boys” ranked as the third most challenged title in 2020. The second most challenged was Reynolds’s adaptation of Kendi’s “Stamped,” which has been swept up in the ongoing manufactured kerfuffle over the teaching of critical race theory in schools. (Other works at the center of the C.R.T. imbroglio range from Anastasia Higginbotham’s picture book “ Not My Idea ,” which interrogates white privilege and includes the aphorism “Whiteness is a bad deal,” to the Times ’ 1619 Project, which reframes American history around the arrival of the first ship bearing enslaved Africans to Virginia.)

Reynolds rejected the idea that challenges to his books are a kind of honor. “People say, ‘Jay, good job, man, it means you’re doing something right.’ Shit, it’s not a compliment to me to be censored,” he said. “It doesn’t matter that I write all these books if they’re not accessible.” Most children, he pointed out, don’t buy books; if their parents don’t provide them, schools and libraries must.

Anyone who considers “All American Boys” a work of defund-the-police agitprop is reading in bad faith. Its real provocation is in showing children that the dynamics of race and state power in this country are complex: How can Black kids negotiate entanglements with police? What, if anything, should non-Black kids do to intervene? “We have thousands of children who need this information,” Reynolds said. “Adults are choosing to keep them from it. That’s a problem. What is everybody so afraid of?”

Judy Blume, whose books for children and young adults have been banned or challenged repeatedly for their candid explorations of sex and the human body, is an admirer of Reynolds’s work. “I feel tremendously connected to Jason,” Blume told me. “I hope he feels connected to me.” (The two writers have never met.) “Censorship is about power,” she said. “It’s anything that causes fear in parents—‘I don’t want my kid to know this.’ For me, there was a short period of feeling sad about it, but that quickly turned to anger, and that’s a better place to be.”

Reynolds’s 2017 novel, “ Long Way Down ,” looks at the impact of gun violence on Black worlds. He wrote the book in verse and incorporated supernatural elements—signs of an artist still engaged by formal experimentation. As the story opens, the protagonist, Will, speaks about the death of his beloved big brother, a victim of a pointless beef in the neighborhood. Will is heading out of his apartment, armed with his brother’s gun: “If someone you love / gets killed, // find the person / who killed // them and / kill them.” The action takes place on the elevator ride to the lobby. At each floor, a different ghost boards: Will’s father, his uncle, a girl he once knew. The book ends ambiguously, declining to say whether Will seeks vengeance or returns home. Reynolds’s books often have open-ended conclusions (“Ghost” closes with the firing of a starter pistol), and many of the students whom he meets want to know how the stories resolve. “I say, ‘What do you think?’ And their answers are more brilliant than anything I could have written,” Reynolds said. His novels don’t just reflect the lives of their readers—they allow them to complete the story.

Later this year, Reynolds will publish a middle-grade novel about superheroes, with pictures by the Mexican American illustrator Raúl the Third. Reynolds is now at work on his first novel for adults, which has elements of magical realism—it’s the tale of a boy born with no mouth, who is sustained not by food but by stories that his father tells him. “I want kids to be able to read me from ground zero all the way up,” he said. “They can read Jason Reynolds their whole lives, if they want to.”

My son Simon, who is eleven, is what educators call a reluctant reader. He is full of questions about the world, but he deflects any suggestion that he look the answers up in a book. In general, he is wiggly and quick to lose interest: abandoning his skateboard to attempt some tricks on his bike, dropping that after a few minutes to grab his basketball. Most kids are easily distracted. How can any book compete?

Still, I have foisted many novels on Simon, including some of Reynolds’s. He maintains that he’s read “Ghost,” but I suspect he’s only seen Reynolds speak about the book on YouTube. Simon does like to write books of his own; he used to staple loose-leaf pages together to bind them. His early stories, always heavily illustrated, document little Black boys with Afros—avatars of the self—doing skateboard tricks, inventing robots, outshooting everyone else on the basketball court.

Simon tagged along one Sunday when I met Reynolds for lunch, at a food hall in D.C. Reynolds arrived wearing his customary black. He did not bend down to greet Simon or launch into the playful banter that grownups often rely on with young kids. He nodded in greeting, as he might with a peer. His sunglasses enhanced his mystique. I had expected my kid, usually so voluble, to show off his cell phone—a new perk of middle school—or even to ask Reynolds for his phone number; he was jealous that we had been texting. Instead, he was quiet. He later told me that he was attempting to seem blasé in order to conceal being starstruck. But in the moment, Simon looked as if he were mirroring Reynolds’s relaxed manner.

Simon was most excited about Reynolds’s red Porsche 911. “Oh, cool,” he said, taking a photograph of the car with his phone. I wish I had taken a photograph of the two of them, my son trying to draw himself up to his full height next to such a tall man, to stand still, to be cool.

In the following months, I repeatedly tried to interest him in Reynolds’s books, offering to read the “Track” series to him. He declined. Not long after we returned from the trip to D.C., Simon began working on a new story, about a boy on a basketball team who is struggling to maintain his friendship with his longtime best pal. When he finished the book, Simon told me, he wanted to send it to Jason. ♦

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National Book Foundation > Author > Jason Reynolds

Jason Reynolds

Finalist , 2019 national book awards longlist , 2017 national book awards finalist , 2016 national book awards.

Jason Reynolds is an award-winning and #1 New York Times bestselling author. Jason’s many books include Miles Morales: Spider Man , the Track series ( Ghost, Patina, Sunny, and Lu ), Long Way Down , which received a Newbery Honor, a Printz Honor, and a Correta Scott King Honor, and Look Both Ways , which was a National Book Award Finalist. More about this author >

Full Honors

• YOUNG PEOPLE'S LITERATURE FINALIST National Book Awards 2019 >
• YOUNG PEOPLE'S LITERATURE LONGLIST National Book Awards 2017 >
• YOUNG PEOPLE'S LITERATURE FINALIST National Book Awards 2016 >

About the book

Look both ways: a tale told in ten blocks.

Jason Reynolds conjures ten tales (one per block) about what happens after the dismissal bell rings, and brilliantly weaves them into one wickedly funny, piercingly poignant look at the detours we face on the walk home, and in life. More about this book >

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Long Way Down

An ode to Put the Damn Guns Down, this is National Book Award Finalist and  New York Times  bestseller Jason Reynolds’s fiercely stunning novel that takes place in sixty potent seconds—the time it takes a kid to decide whether or not he’s going to murder the guy who killed his brother. More about this book >

Ghost wants to be the fastest sprinter on his elite middle school track team, but his past is slowing him down in this first electrifying novel of a brand-new series from Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe Award–winning author Jason Reynolds. More about this book >

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Jason Reynolds is an award-winning and #1 New York Times bestselling author. Jason’s many books include Miles Morales: Spider Man , the Track series ( Ghost, Patina, Sunny, and Lu ), Long Way Down , which received a Newbery Honor, a Printz Honor, and a Correta Scott King Honor, and Look Both Ways , which was a National Book Award Finalist. His latest book, Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, is a collaboration with Ibram X. Kendi. Jason is the 2020-2021 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature and has appeared on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah , Late Night with Seth Meyers , and CBS This Morning . He is on faculty at Lesley University, for the Writing for Young People MFA Program and lives in Washington, DC. You can find his ramblings at JasonWritesBooks.com.

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Jason Reynolds: The Antidote To Hopelessness

Jason Reynolds is an award-winning author and National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. This hour, Jason speaks with Manoush about reaching kids through stories that let them feel understood.

This conversation is part of a collaboration between NPR and the Library of Congress National Book Festival. For more information about the festival visit loc.gov/bookfest

This episode of the TED Radio Hour was produced by Rachel Faulkner and Fiona Geiran. It was edited by Rachel Faulkner and Sanaz Meshkinpour .

Our production staff also includes Katie Monteleone , Diba Mohtasham , James Delahoussaye , Matthew Cloutier , Sylvie Douglis , and Harrison Vijay Tsui. Jeff Rogers is our executive producer. Our audio engineer is Daniel Shukhin.

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Jason Reynolds: ‘What’s unusual about my story is that I became a writer’

The American author on his gut response to a friend’s death, how to get young people reading, and the value of crochet

J ason Reynolds, a 34-year-old from Washington DC, didn’t grow up expecting to be a writer: indeed, he was 17 before he read a book from start to finish. But it might be his atypical background that allows him to connect so powerfully with teenage readers. He has published a dozen novels – mostly for young adults – in the US, has been a National Book award finalist and is a fixture on the New York Times bestseller list. He was also recently named on the Guardian’s Frederick Douglass 200 list , which honours the 200 living individuals who best embody the work and spirit of the American abolitionist and politician. Now one of Reynolds’s books, Long Way Down , is being released in the UK. Told in verse, it follows Will, a 15-year-old boy out for revenge after his older brother is shot dead.

The starting point for Long Way Down came from personal experience. What happened to you? When I was 19, a friend of mine was murdered. That night my friends and I went to his mom’s house and we were all planning to figure out who did this to him so we could exact revenge. So we could murder the man who murdered our friend. And I just remember the pain – the pain of the lost friend but also the pain of meeting a part of myself that I didn’t know existed. A part of myself that could lose control to the point where I could commit a murder. That’s a very human thing. I think that most of us don’t ever meet that part of ourselves that exists within all of us. This rage that, when triggered, will cause you to do things that you don’t necessarily understand that you’re doing.

A key tension in the book is whether Will is capable of going through with the plan to kill his brother’s murderer. You didn’t, but could you have done it? Absolutely. Oh yes, without a doubt. But only in a certain time frame. It it was like being frozen in a block of ice, right, and in this moment, within this block of ice, I know that I could commit a murder. There are crimes of passion and there are moments when we lose control and, for me and my friends, we lost control. We lost control! And it wasn’t that we were animals or murderers, we were children who were heartbroken.

There’s an author’s note in Long Way Down where you recognise that young people, particularly boys, don’t like to read. Then you add: “So here’s what I plan to do: NOT WRITE BORING BOOKS.” To me that’s one plus one is two. Young people – especially young men – it’s not that they hate reading, it’s that they hate boredom. So my thing was: I need to write a story that is interesting, that is gripping, that can connect to them and their experiences, and write something that’s not very intimidating, because there’s so much white space.

You didn’t finish a book until you were 17 – Richard Wright ’s 1945 memoir, Black Boy , about growing up in the American south . Was that unusual where you grew up? The only thing that’s unusual about my story is that I became a writer. But me not reading is the norm. And me not reading till I was 17 – none of my friends did. Most of my friends still don’t, and that’s boys and girls.

You’ve had a lot of success now, but you still do a lot of talks at schools and juvenile detention centres. Why is that important? It’s a push-pull thing. One side is about staying engaged, so I can be truthful about the things I’m writing about: you’ve got to know them in order to show them. But it’s also about making sure that they know that they can be me. Because they can’t be what they can’t see. It isn’t rocket science, we’ve seen it happen over and over. Think about golf: Tiger Woods starts playing golf and all of a sudden black kids all over the world are like: “Yo!” Serena and Venus Williams, they play tennis, they have beads in their hair, they’re from Compton, California, and black kids who felt like they didn’t have a place in tennis, suddenly tennis feels more palatable. This is the way it works.

You’ve been writing an average of three books a year for the past few years. What drives you? At first it was the fear of it all going away. It’s like when you’ve been hungry, or when you’ve tried and failed, or when you’ve hit the bottom, when you get a second chance, you do anything you can to secure your spot. You do anything you can to force people to take note of what you’re doing. Now, though, I just have so much to say and I want to make sure I say it all.

Is it true you unwind by crocheting? Not any more. I used to and I still can; I could still sit down and crochet a hat or a sweater if I needed to. But I’ve been thinking about it, though: it taught me patience, it taught me diligence. It taught me that it’s one stitch at a time. No matter what it is in life, if you skip a loop, you have to undo it and start again. If you skip a step then the thing you make will be distorted, it’ll be gathered and bunched in places, it’ll be ill-fitting. One stitch at a time and that’s life! That’s how it works.

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Jason Reynolds

Jason Reynolds is a New York Times bestselling author and has received numerous awards, including a Newbery Honor, multiple Coretta Scott King honors, and is a National Book Award Finalist as well as a National Ambassador for Young People's Literature for 2020-2021. Reynolds's latest books include Long Way Down (Simon & Schuster, 2019),  For Every One  (Simon & Schuster, 2018) and the latest in the Track series, the novel,  Sunny (Simon & Schuster, 2018). He lives in Washington, D.C.

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Jason Reynolds

Jason Reynolds is a #1 New York Times bestselling author, a Newbery Award Honoree, a Printz Award Honoree, a two-time National Book Award finalist, a Kirkus Award winner, a two-time Walter Dean Myers Award winner, an NAACP Image Award Winner, and the recipient of multiple Coretta Scott King honors. Reynolds is also the 2020-2021 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. His many books include When I Was the Greatest, The Boy in the Black Suit, All American Boys (cowritten with Brendan Kiely), As Brave as You, For Every One, the Track series (Ghost, Patina, Sunny, and Lu), Look Both Ways, and Long Way Down, which received a Newbery Honor, a Printz Honor, and a Coretta Scott King Honor. He lives in Washington, DC. You can find his ramblings at JasonWritesBooks.com.

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By the Book

How Jason Reynolds Distinguishes Y.A. Books From Adult Fiction

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“It has more to do with tone than anything else,” says the current National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, Jason Reynolds, whose latest book is “Ain’t Burned All the Bright” (in collaboration with the artist Jason Griffin). “With a shift in tone, ‘Salvage the Bones’ might be a young adult novel. And that would make it different, certainly, but not a lesser work.”

What books are on your night stand?

Right now, it’s an advance reading copy of Ocean Vuong’s latest collection, “Time Is a Mother,” which is remarkable. Also, Jamaica Kincaid’s “Talk Stories,” John Irving’s “A Prayer for Owen Meany,” which I’m rereading, and an ARC of NoViolet Bulawayo’s “Glory,” which is genius. Honestly, I keep books on my night stand for the morning. I like to wake up, read a few pages of something to spark my creativity and the work I might do that day. At night, I look at art books that I keep stacked in the nest cubby beneath my night stand.

What’s the last great book you read?

You know, if I’m being honest, the last book that I really loved (which makes it great to me) was probably “Iggie’s House,” by Judy Blume. I’d read it long ago, but I recently reread it and suddenly it feels even more … alive. It’s not one of her most popular books, but when I think about the fact that it was published in 1970 and addresses white flight, I’m enamored by Blume’s courage and decision-making in the work.

Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).

A fall day in Arizona, preferably in an outdoor bathtub. There’s something about a desert breeze, the silence and stillness of the terrain, and the big sky that always gets me. Yes, even more than the beach. Oh, and the book needs to be a tougher read. Something I have to concentrate on to enjoy.

What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of?

I’m not sure it’s completely unheard-of, but “Exercises in Style,” by Raymond Queneau. I reference it all the time whenever I want to shake up my style or laugh at all the ways one might say the same thing.

What book should everybody read before the age of 21?

What book should nobody read until the age of 40?

Also, “Beloved.” These answers are connected because I think “Beloved” is a story that should be read, or at least attempted, multiple times. It’s a novel one has to grow into.

Which writers — novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets — working today do you admire most?

Sheesh. So many. Let’s start with one of your own. Actually, one of our own. Wesley Morris. I love his work and I think he has a unique way of making odd but ingenious connections. Another person who does this is Hanif Abdurraqib. Also Camonghne Felix. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Jesmyn Ward, Kiese Laymon, Ali Smith, A. S. King, Kacen Callender, Amber McBride, Elizabeth Acevedo, Mahogany L. Browne, Rasheed Copeland, Candice Iloh, Dhonielle Clayton, Solmaz Sharif, Elena Ferrante, Mitchell S. Jackson, D. Watkins, Kwame Alexander, Renée Watson, Jacqueline Woodson, and the list goes on and on. There’s not enough time or space for the writers who inspire me. I’m so grateful to be working during this time.

How do you distinguish Y.A. books from adult fiction?

I’m still trying to figure that out. You know, I’m working on some adult fiction right now, and based on what I’m learning from my edits, it has more to do with tone than anything else. My issue is that people create this massive chasm between the two, which sometimes feels like a way to diminish the work written for young people. Because of my disdain for that, I’ve tried really hard to push against the dividing line but ultimately, I’m learning there is a difference. I’m just not sure it’s as drastic as we try to make it. With a shift in tone, “Salvage the Bones” might be a young adult novel. And that would make it different, certainly, but not a lesser work.

Which young adult books would you recommend to people who don’t usually read Y.A.?

“Monster,” by Walter Dean Myers, “Shout,” by Laurie Halse Anderson, “Maus,” by Art Spiegelman, “Fun Home,” by Alison Bechdel, “Brown Girl Dreaming,” by Jacqueline Woodson, “Nothing,” by Janne Teller, “Platero y Yo,” by Juan Ramón Jiménez, and “Monday’s Not Coming,” by Tiffany D. Jackson. There’s many, many more, but this is a start.

Has a book ever brought you closer to another person, or come between you?

I’ll tell you, my dear, late friend Brook Stephenson is the man who introduced me to the short story. I used to groan about how I didn’t understand them and therefore would never attempt them, and he suggested I read “Solo on the Drums,” by Ann Petry. Maybe it was timing. Maybe it was the story. But it broke me open and showed me the possibility of the form. It drew me much closer to him. Hell, maybe it drew me much closer to myself.

What moves you most in a work of literature?

Character and language. I want writers to create a protagonist I want to eat with. And I want them to use language I want to … eat.

How do you organize your books?

I love this question. So, I have one of those big bookshelves in my office with 10 separate shelves. And instead of organizing the case from top to bottom, I alphabetize each individual shelf so that when it’s time to add a book, I don’t have to shift the entire system. Instead, I have 10 possible places the book could go, and still be in order. Of course, there are still 200 books on my office floor. But let’s not talk about that. Next question.

What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves?

The entire Captain Underpants series. But you’d only be surprised if you don’t know me.

What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?

When my father passed away, I was given his devotional book, “Grace for the Moment,” by Max Lucado. It’s not a book I would’ve ever bought, and reading daily devotionals isn’t really my thing, but to have this item with hundreds of tabs in it because he’d reread it every year is incredibly special. Sometimes I try to pick a page that he’s marked all up just to see why he kept coming back to it. It makes me feel like there’s something he’s trying to teach me. Still.

You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?

This is the question I’ve been waiting for! OK, so this is selfish of me, but how about I excuse myself, and invite a fourth to take my place. Toni Morrison, Jesmyn Ward, James Baldwin and Kiese Laymon. We can tape it so I can see it later. I don’t need to be there. But I’ll make fish plates beforehand. And leave a deck of cards on the table. And a case of wine. And what I’d hope to see (on the playback) is a tremendous amount of laughter, and maybe even a few tears. Jesmyn and Kiese will probably deflect all this but, hey, we love y’all! And I’m certain they would’ve too.

Whom would you want to write your life story?

Kiese Laymon. Not only does he have a particular command of language, I know he works with love in mind. If anyone can wield honesty in both a brutal and careful way, it’s Kiese. And that’s what I’d want.

What do you plan to read next?

I think I’m gonna check out the Magritte biography by Alex Danchev.

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Born in Washington, DC and raised in Oxon Hill, Jason Reynolds is a #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than a dozen books. At nine years old, he drew inspiration from rap music, and began writing poetry. He now writes primarily for elementary and middle school aged kids, including Look Both Ways: A Tale Told in Ten Blocks, Stuntboy, in the Meantime, and Long Way Down, which was named a Newbery Honor Book, and best young adult work by the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Awards. His book, Ghost, was a National Book Award Finalist for Young People’s Literature. He also wrote a Marvel Comic, Miles Morales: Spider-Man, in 2017, just three years after his first novel, When I Was the Greatest, won the Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe Award for New Talent.

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Jason Reynolds author biography, plus links to books by Jason Reynolds.

Author snapshot, jason reynolds.

Jason Reynolds is a #1 New York Times bestselling author, a Newbery Award Honoree, a Printz Award Honoree, a two-time National Book Award finalist, a Kirkus Award winner, a Carnegie Medal winner, a two-time Walter Dean Myers Award winner, an NAACP Image Award Winner, and the recipient of multiple Coretta Scott King honors. He's also the 2020–2021 National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. His many books include All American Boys (cowritten with Brendan Kiely), When I Was the Greatest , The Boy in the Black Suit , Stamped , As Brave as You , For Every One , the Track series ( Ghost , Patina , Sunny , and Lu ), Look Both Ways , and Long Way Down , which received a Newbery Honor, a Printz Honor, and a Coretta Scott King Honor. He lives in Washington, DC. Jason Griffin created the artwork for My Name Is Jason. Mine Too , written by Jason Reynolds. He's an artist and master collaborator, who has shown his art in major cities all over the world. His most recent projects include a commissioned mural for the children's cancer wing at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx, as well as a residency at the new contemporary art museum in Amsterdam, Het HEM. He currently creates in Queens, New York.

This biography was last updated on 01/11/2022.

The above represents the biographical information provided by the publisher for the most recent book by this author that BookBrowse has covered. As such, it is likely a brief snapshot in time. If you are looking for a more expansive biography, you may wish to do an internet search for the author's website or social media presence. If you are the author or publisher and would like us to update this biography, send the complete text and we will replace the old with the new.

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Biography of Jason Reynolds

Jason Reynolds is an American author of more than a dozen books for young adults.

Born in Washington, D.C., Reynolds began writing poetry at a young age, inspired by rap music. He has said that he didn't read a novel cover-to-cover until he was seventeen. Reynolds studied English at the University of Maryland and moved to New York City after graduation.

Reynolds published his first novel, When I Was The Greatest, in 2014. The novel received the 2015 Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe Award for New Talent from the American Library Association. Reynolds is also a New York Times– bestselling author, a Newbery honoree, a Printz Award honoree, and a National Book Award finalist. Stamped , his history book for young adults written in collaboration with Ibram X. Kendi, was released in March 2020.

As the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature in 2020-2021, Reynolds helped young people connect with reading and elevate young-adult literature nationally.

Study Guides on Works by Jason Reynolds

Ain't burned all the bright jason reynolds.

Ain't Burned All the Bright is a book by American author Jason Reynolds. It was published in 2022 by Atheneum and Caitlyin Dlouhy Books. The three-part poem and visual illustrations explore the struggles of an African-American family coming to...

• Study Guide

All American Boys Jason Reynolds , Brendan Kiely

All American Boys is a young-adult novel, co-written by American authors Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely and published in 2015. They were motivated to write the book after Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Missouri by a white police officer...

Ghost Jason Reynolds

Jason Reynolds's Ghost (2016) is a young-adult novel about Castle "Ghost" Cranshaw, a middle-schooler who joins a track team as a sprinter and develops greater behavioral discipline as he trains.

At twelve, Castle lives in an impoverished...

Long Way Down Jason Reynolds

Jason Reynolds' Long Way Down is a 2017 young-adult novel about a fifteen-year-old who sets out to avenge his brother's fatal shooting and encounters several ghosts who make him question his resolve.

Written in verse and narrated by Will Holloman,...

Look Both Ways Jason Reynolds

Look Both Ways is a young-adult novel by American author Jason Reynolds. Published in 2019 by Atheneum and Caitlyn Dlouhy Books, it features gripping illustrations by Alexander Nabaun. The story is told from the perspective of a young boy walking...

Miles Morales Jason Reynolds

Miles Morales is a novel written by the award-winning author Jason Reynolds, who decided to create his own version of the well-known Spider-Man world. The novel follows an African American and Hispanic boy called Miles who goes to the Brooklyn...

Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You Jason Reynolds , Ibram X. Kendi

Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You is a "remixed" version of Ibram X. Kendi's award-winning history book, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (2016). Kendi's 2016 Stamped , which won the National Book...

Stuntboy, in the Meantime Jason Reynolds

Stuntboy in the Meantime is a graphic Young Adult novel by Jason Reynolds which was originally published on November 9, 2021. The book tells the story of Portico Reeves, a mild-mannered school student whose secret identity is Stuntboy. Portico...

Jason Reynolds

• Jason Reynolds is known for The Brain That Wouldn't Die (2020) , Jason Rising: A Friday the 13th Fan Film (2021) and The Suicide Pact (2014) .

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Hollywood actor Ryan Reynolds revealed as the newest Chief Island Officer of Yas Island, Abu Dhabi

Entertainment hollywood.

He takes the mantle from former CIOs and actors Kevin Hart and Jason Mamoa

Hollywood actor Ryan Reynolds has been revealed as the newest Chief Island Officer of Yas Island, Abu Dhabi.

The 'Dead Pool' star takes the mantle from former CIOs and actors Kevin Hart and Jason Mamoa.

The Candadian actor is expected to trump up the Island’s top tourist attractions.

A trailer, announcing his appointment, has also been revealed.

In the trailer, Reynolds descends from the sky, parachuting straight into the heart of the action amidst speeding cars on Yas Marina Circuit. But he misses his landing spot and ends up with his feet planted at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix Circuit. The video also sees Reynolds looking back on his lush career as an actor, producer, and owner of Welsh Football Club. But half of his conversation is drowned due to the sound of speeding cars around the circuit.

You can also witness the actor taking a stab at roller-coaster at the Ferrari World Yas Island and enjoying the various adrenaline-charged rides. The actor, whose comic timing is legendary, is a screamer during those rides.

He’s on call to promote the Island destination to the world.

“With the appointment of Ryan Reynolds as our latest Chief Island Officer of Yas Island Abu Dhabi, we continue the tradition of excellence established by Kevin Hart and Jason Momoa. Reynolds brings his own unique blend of charisma, energy, and enthusiasm to the role, promising to elevate the Yas Island experience to even greater heights. We're thrilled to embark on this exhilarating journey with him, inviting fans worldwide to be part of the legacy,” said Liam Findlay, CEO of Miral Destinations, in a statement.

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'Foolish' roster call that became a coach killer and still looms large over wasted Rabbitohs years

With the coaching decision now made, eyes will turn to the roster calls that have contributed to the downfall of Jason Demetriou .

The one that looms largest is the decision to offer Adam Reynolds a one-year contract when he wanted three.

Standing before the media on Wednesday morning to explain the Demetriou sacking and lay out a vision for the future, South Sydney CEO Blake Solly was asked if he regretted the club's call to "let Reynolds go".

READ MORE: Souths boss lifts lid on renewed Bennett pursuit

READ MORE: Heartwarming text after Demetriou axed

READ MORE:  Ex player with 'survivor guilt' to sue Manly

He corrected the journalist, arguing that the Rabbitohs wanted the star halfback to stick around, just not on his terms.

Solly added that the Rabbitohs were in no position to offer Reynolds the contract he desired due to salary cap constraints but few will buy that comment.

Ask Bulldogs general manager Phil Gould about the player market and he'll tell you it's never been more fluid . Salary caps that are bent out of shape can be straightened up easily enough, it's all about priorities.

Simply put, the Rabbitohs prioritised other players due to their misplaced faith in Lachlan Ilias to seamlessly take over the No.7 jersey and keep the premiership window wide open.

Ilias was just 21 when he was given that responsibility.

A cursory glance across the NRL is all that's needed to reaffirm what Andrew Johns has been saying about halfbacks for several years now: they don't mature until their mid to late twenties and they don't start to dominate until they turn 30.

The only game managing half who has effectively bucked that trend in the last five years has been Nathan Cleary and he's proving to be one in a million.

Despite Solly's reluctance to admit it, the Rabbitohs gambled the house on an unproven youngster and lost when they had one of the best halfbacks in the NRL in their grasp.

When that decision was first made Demetriou doubled down with a statement that raised eyebrows at the time and looks truly foolish now: Ilias would be "the best halfback the club has had in a long time".

Watch the 2024 NRL premiership live and free on Nine and 9Now .

It was more than likely designed to give his young No.7 confidence, but it came across as flat out disrespect to the club's only premiership halfback for 43 years.

Reynolds had just turned 31 at the time he departed the Rabbitohs and despite private concerns that a chronic knee injury would slow him down and then send him into retirement before he could deliver another title, he's still going strong in Brisbane and looks every bit the key jigsaw piece of a premiership puzzle.

With Ilias sent packing after breaking his leg in reserve grade , the bungled handling of Reynolds' contract negotiation that led to his exit is no longer defensible.

His absence from a team that is searching for answers is glaring.

Asked at Wednesday's press conference if a player cleanout was on the cards, Solly was bullish about the talent available to interim coach Ben Hornby and the permanent coach who takes over in 2025.

Yet, even accepting that the Rabbitohs have been dealt a shocking hand this season due to injuries and suspensions, there are serious questions to be answered about the balance of the current roster.

Star five-eighth Cody Walker is 34 and is off contract at the end of next season. Even if Souths believe he has one more year in him after that, it's unlikely he'll be around long enough to win a premiership unless the Rabbitohs can find a halfback capable of getting the team around.

As Demetriou was being sacked, the Rabbitohs head of football was in the UK attempting to sign St Helens halfback Lewis Dodd.

The 22-year-old Englishman looks an exceptional talent but is he, like Cleary, a one in a million unicorn who can take charge of a premiership contending team in his early twenties? If not, the chances are the Rabbitohs are at the start of a rebuild that will put Walker into retirement before they are capable of mounting a challenge.

Meanwhile, Reynolds and the Broncos look best placed to end the Panthers' dynasty and potentially start one of their own.

• south sydney rabbitohs
• Adam Reynolds
• cody walker
• Jason Demetriou

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Ryan Reynolds' R-Rated Comedy ‘Animal Friends’ Sets 2025 Release Date

Reynolds will star opposite Aubrey Plaza, Jason Momoa, and Daniel Levy.

The Big Picture

• Get ready for an R-rated road trip adventure with Ryan Reynolds, Aubrey Plaza, Jason Momoa, and Dan Levy in Animal Friends .
• Reynolds' busy year includes MCU debut with Deadpool & Wolverine , family drama IF , and upcoming projects with A-list stars.
• Stay tuned for more updates on Reynolds' upcoming projects.

In the midst of dominating the movie conversation with Marvel Studios ' only film of 2024, Deadpool & Wolverine , yet another intriguing Ryan Reynolds project has secured a release date. A new report from Variety revealed that Animal Friends , described as an R-rated road trip adventure that combines live-action and animation, will officially be released on August 15, 2025. Reynolds will star in the film alongside Aubrey Plaza , Jason Momoa , Dan Levy , Lil Rel Howery , Addison Rae , and Ellie Bamber . Kevin Burrow and Matt Milder penned the script, and Emmy-award winner Peter Atencio will direct. Reynolds' production company, Maximum Effort, and Namit Malhotra 's Prime Focus Studios are set to produce.

This is a big year for Reynolds, who will make his MCU debut as the Merc with a Mouth alongside Hugh Jackman 's Wolverine in Deadpool & Wolverine . He is also set to appear in IF (Imaginary Friend), a family drama/comedy starring himself, John Krasinski , Steve Carell , Emily Blunt , Matt Damon , and Sam Rockwell . Reynolds is well-known for being a lovable Hollywood figure, cultivating relationships and cameoing/starring alongside Chris Evans , Will Ferrell , Dwayne Johnson , Brad Pitt , and Aaron Taylor-Johnson . You can count us in for an animated/live-action R-rated road trip adventure with Reynolds, Plaza, Momoa, and Levy.

What Else Does the ‘Animal Friends’ Cast Have Going On?

Outside of Deadpool & Wolverine and IF , which are both slated to release this summer, Reynolds has a slew of projects already confirmed to be in development. He will reprise his role as Nolan Booth alongside Johnson and Gal Gadot in Red Notice 2 , and is also reportedly working on sequels for Free Guy and Detective Pikachu . Momoa, who recently starred in two top-15 box office hits in 2023 with Fast X and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom , is set to star in an upcoming Minecraft movie alongside Jack Black , Kate McKinnon , and Jennifer Coolidge .

Plaza, who received an Emmy nomination in 2023 for her role as Harper Spiller in The White Lotus , is set to star in Marvel Studios' upcoming Agatha series on Disney+ , and will also appear in Francis Ford Coppola 's Megalopolis with Giancarlo Esposito and Shia LaBeouf . Levy, a four-time Emmy winner best known for his work on Schitt's Creek , will co-write the upcoming comedy series, Standing By , which he'll also star in alongside David Tennant and Glenn Close .

Animal Friends will arrive exclusively in theaters on August 15, 2025, and Reynolds will appear in IF and Deadpool & Wolverine over the coming months. Stay tuned to Collider for future updates.

Deadpool & Wolverine

Breaking: Mystery Skydiver Unmasked as Hollywood Sensation Ryan Reynolds, Yas Island's Newest Chief Island Officer

Abu Dhabi, UAE - April 29, 2024: Yas Island Abu Dhabi, the region’s leading leisure and entertainment destination, appointed Hollywood’s most charismatic superstar Ryan Reynolds as its newest Chief Island Officer (CIO). Following in the footsteps of former CIOs Kevin Hart and Jason Momoa, Reynolds brings his trademark charm and wit to the role, promising an unforgettable era of adventure and excitement.

In the uproarious new trailer, Reynolds descends from the sky, parachuting straight into the heart of the action amidst speeding cars on Yas Marina Circuit. However, much to his chagrin, he misses his intended landing spot at the illustrious W Abu Dhabi - Yas Island, adding a hilarious twist to his grand entrance.

Reynolds strides forward with an air of unmistakable confidence, poised to unveil his new role as CIO. With pride, he recounts the diverse array of hats he's worn throughout his career: actor, producer, owner of a Welsh football club and now another illustrious title to his repertoire, proudly proclaiming himself the Chief Island Officer of Yas Island Abu Dhabi. Yet, as he attempts to continue his dramatic speech, his words are swiftly drowned out by the buzzing cacophony of speeding cars. The video sets the stage for an electrifying journey ahead as Reynolds prepares to dive headfirst into Yas Island's thrilling attractions. After all, its Ryan's island, and everyone else is just along for the ride.

"Liam Findlay, CEO of Miral Destinations, enthusiastically remarked, “With the appointment of Ryan Reynolds as our latest Chief Island Officer of Yas Island Abu Dhabi, we continue the tradition of excellence established by Kevin Hart and Jason Momoa. Reynolds brings his own unique blend of charisma, energy, and enthusiasm to the role, promising to elevate the Yas Island experience to even greater heights. We're thrilled to embark on this exhilarating journey with him, inviting fans worldwide to be part of the legacy.”

From speeding through rollercoasters at Ferrari World Yas Island, Abu Dhabi to exploring Gotham City at Warner Bros. World™ Yas Island, Abu Dhabi Reynolds is rolling into Yas Island with unmatched energy and style, inviting fans to #RollLikeRyan and experience the island like never before.

For more information, please visit: https://www.yasisland.com/

Reynolds question comes back to haunt Bunnies as roster calls blamed for Demetriou implosion

There are fears that changing Souths’ coach won’t do anything to help their on-field results because the club has shot itself in the foot with recruitment for far too long.

Jason Demetriou’s tenure officially ended with his sacking on Tuesday night and whoever replaces him at the club long-term — hot favourite Wayne Bennett or otherwise — will have to tackle roster long-standing roster challenges that may have doomed the outgoing coach for failure.

The club recently signed 22-year-old halfback Lewis Dodd from the Super League, with the club still struggling to recover from letting champion Adam Reynolds leave in 2021.

Lachlan Ilias, considered Reynolds successor, was lauded by Demetriou as potentially the best halfback the club has ever produced. But he has now been given permission to negotiate with rivals.

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Reynolds, meanwhile, is still producing magic for the Brisbane Broncos at 33 — leading them to the grand final last year — and Souths CEO Blake Solly was grilled on Wednesday about what many now consider a significant recruitment blunder.

Reynolds joined the Broncos after only being offered a one-year extension by the Rabbitohs but Solly insisted the club didn’t “let him go”

“Of course we regret Adam going,” Solly said.

“We didn’t let Adam go, we made Adam an offer and Adam wanted longer term. We were very happy to have Adam stay here but Adam, for his own reasons, in particular family and financial security, which no-one can ever argue with, decided to take the longer-term offer that was on in Brisbane. But we wanted Adam to stay.

Pressed on whether club regretted not offering Reynolds a longer deal, Solly answered: “We weren’t in a position at the time to do it in the salary cap restraints we had. It’s hard to regret something you don’t have control over.”

The club’s management of its squad — including going “all-in” on re-signing ageing veterans including Cody Walker and Damien Cook — was debated by the NRL 360 panel on Tuesday night.

There was also concerns Souths have failed to reinvigorate an ageing pack that has seen them concede a whopping 250 points in just eight games to start the 2024 season.

Braith Anasta questioned if Souths’ recruitment is behind Demetriou’s poor recent record, which led to his sacking.

“Have they made the right decisions there, though? I think we should delve a little bit deeper into recruitment,” Anasta said on NRL 360.

Brent Read agreed Souths have been poor in recruitment recently.

“Well, no, they haven’t,” Read said.

“They’re short in the middles. Junior Tatola is out at the moment, but they’re desperately short on middles.

“They didn’t need to go on so on half. They should have gone on the front row from somewhere.”

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The Daily Telegraph’s Dave Riccio found it damning that Souths didn’t make a play for Addin Fonua-Blake.

“I found it interesting they made no serious play for Addin Fonua-Blake,” Riccio said.

“He would just walked into that South Sydney pack and change the entire dimension of how they look as a footy team.

“And with the retirement of (Thomas) Burgess or moving on of Burgess, it does leave questions on where they move next as far as recruitment in the forward pack because there’s just no ready-made replacements on the open market.”

James Graham found the signing of Jack Wighton curious because he wasn’t even coming to play in his preferred position.

“Even with the acquisition of Jack Wighton, who I think has been Souths best player, but that was a surprise signing,” Graham said.

“They’ve got Campbell Graham and Isaiah Tass in the centres. They’ve got the style of player that Jack Wighton is.

That, for me, was a straight... It’s great, brilliant, but I thought, oh, there’s going to be some players moved, but nobody did.”

Anasta believes Souths have been hurt by paying big contracts to ageing spine players that have lost form, which sparked debate.

“They went all in too on Cody Walker and Damien Cook as well,” Anasta said.

“Big deals, upgrades, extensions at the age of 32.”

“But at the time they were going well,” Riccio countered.

“And you run the risk of losing them and you start all over again.”

“They were playing well and you have got to roll the dice in recruitment I get that, but it hasn’t really paid off, has it?” Anasta said.

Like, when you look at it back... It’s all great in hindsight. I get it. I’m not disagreeing. But you can’t say it’s been a success either though.”

Dave Riccio believes the constant media circus around Latrell Mitchell’s form has been a distraction.

“There’s so many elements at play here, at times they look like an ageing roster,” Riccio said.

“At times, they’re completely bereft due to injuries and suspension.

“The constant headline and speculation over Latrell Mitchell’s performances and future at the footy club.

“His commitment to the club. I think there’s a myriad of issues that have held this footy club back.”

However, Anasta believes Souths need to stop relying on their junior pathways and be more active in the player market.

“I think they’re struggling with their development and pathways there at Souths,” Anasta said.

“I think the S.G. Ball didn’t make the finals. The Matthews Cup didn’t make the finals. Their Jersey Fleg came sixth.

“They’ve had Taaffe, Ilias and Peter Mamouzelos, who are the next biggest things who won the S.G. Ball.

“They’re arguably the best spine in their age group who have not gone on to bigger and better things, which they assume would.

So, there’s an obvious issue there. South Sydney, I played in the junior system there, was always the best.

“Such a great breeding ground for talent. And I just feel like they need to make moves like Melbourne and the Roosters, because they kind of lean and depend on their juniors a lot.”

Israel offers to suspend Rafah invasion if release of hostages and ceasefire deal is secured with Hamas

A planned incursion into the southern Gaza city of Rafah could be suspended should a deal emerge to secure the release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas, said Israel's foreign minister. 

The comments came as international mediators push for a deal to achieve a ceasefire in the six months of fighting in Gaza and the release of Israeli hostages taken during Hamas' October 7 assault that sparked the war.

"The release of the hostages is the top priority for us," Foreign Minister Israel Katz said during an interview with local media. 

Asked if that included putting off a planned operation to eliminate Hamas battalions in the city of Rafah, Katz answered, "Yes."

He went on to say: "If there will be a deal, we will suspend the operation."

Though Katz is a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's security cabinet, he is not a member of the narrow-forum war cabinet overseeing the Gaza offensive.

Israel claims Rafah is home to four Hamas combat battalions reinforced by thousands of retreating fighters, and it must defeat them to achieve victory.

But Rafah, which abuts the Egyptian border, is sheltering more than a million Palestinians who fled the Israeli offensive through the rest of Gaza and say the prospect of fleeing yet again is terrifying.

Latest ceasefire proposal

Earlier on Saturday, Hamas said it had received Israel's official response to its latest ceasefire proposal in Egyptian- and Qatari-mediated negotiations and will study it before submitting its reply.

Senior Hamas official Khalil al-Hayya gave no details of Israel's offer, but said it was in response to a Hamas proposal two weeks ago.

Negotiations earlier this month centred on a six-week cease-fire proposal and the release of 40 civilian and sick hostages in exchange for freeing hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.

A separate Hamas statement said leaders from the three main militant groups active in Gaza discussed attempts to end the war.

It didn't mention the Israeli proposal.

The statements came hours after an Egyptian delegation ended a visit to Israel where it discussed a “new vision” for a prolonged cease-fire in Gaza, according to an Egyptian official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to freely discuss the developments.

It wasn't immediately clear whether Israel’s proposal was directly related to the visit.

The discussions between Egyptian and Israeli officials focused on the first stage of a plan that would include a limited exchange of hostages held by Hamas for Palestinian prisoners, and the return of a significant number of displaced Palestinians to their homes in northern Gaza “with minimum restrictions,” the Egyptian official said.

Mediators are working on a compromise that will answer most of both parties’ main demands, which could pave the way to continued negotiations with the goal of a deal to end the war, the official said.

Hamas has said it won’t back down from demands for a permanent cease-fire and full withdrawal of Israeli troops. Israel has rejected both and said it will continue military operations until Hamas is defeated and that it will retain a security presence in Gaza.

On Thursday, the United States and 17 other countries appealed to Hamas to release all of its hostages as a pathway to end the crisis.

Hamas wants to parlay any deal into a permanent end to the fighting — short of a formal peace — as the Islamist group is sworn to Israel's destruction.

Israel plans to pursue the war until Hamas' governing and military capacities are dismantled.

More than 130 hostages are still being held in Gaza captivity, including women and children.

New video of Israeli hostages

As Hamas issued a new video showing two of the hostages pleading for their release and sending love to their families, thousands of Israelis gathered in Tel Aviv in protest, demanding that the government do more to secure their release.

The two men, identified as Keith Siegel, 64, and Omri Miran, 47, speak individually in front of an empty background.

They send their love to their families and ask to be released.

Miran was taken hostage from his home in the community of Nahal Oz in front of his wife and two young daughters during the Hamas killing spree that sparked the war in Gaza.

Siegel, who is a dual US citizen, was taken captive with his wife from another border town.

She was later released during a brief November truce.

The video was published during the Passover holiday, when Jews traditionally celebrate the biblical story of gaining freedom from slavery in Egypt.

At one point, Siegel breaks down crying as he recounts celebrating the holiday with his family last year and expressing his hope that they will be reunited.

The men seen in the video match photographs of Keith Samuel Siegel and Omri Miran showed by their relatives to Reuters after their kidnapping.

Reuters was not able to independently verify the location or date when the video was filmed.

Reuters/ AP

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