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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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By Louis Menand

By Steve Martin

Jason Reynolds

American young adult novelist / from wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, dear wikiwand ai, let's keep it short by simply answering these key questions:.

Can you list the top facts and stats about Jason Reynolds?

Summarize this article for a 10 year old

Jason Reynolds (born December 6, 1983) is an American author of novels and poetry for young adult and middle-grade audience. Born in Washington, D.C. , and raised in neighboring Oxon Hill, Maryland , Reynolds found inspiration in rap and had an early focus on poetry, publishing several poetry collections before his first novel in 2014, When I Was The Greatest , which won the John Steptoe Award for New Talent .

In the next four years, Reynolds wrote eight more novels, most notably the New York Times best-selling Track series— Ghost (2016), Patina (2017), Sunny (2018), Lu (2018)—and As Brave as You (2016). Ghost was a National Book Award Finalist for Young People's Literature and As Brave as You won the Kirkus Prize, the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work for Youth/Teen, and the Schneider Family Book Award . Reynolds also wrote a Marvel Comics novel called Miles Morales : Spider-Man (2017).

In 2017, Reynolds returned to poetry with Long Way Down , a novel in verse that was named a Newbery Honor book, a Printz Honor Book, and best young adult work by the Mystery Writers of America 's Edgar Awards . In 2019, he wrote Look Both Ways , for which he won a Carnegie Medal .

From 2020 to 2022, Reynolds was the Library of Congress ' National Ambassador for Young People's Literature . [1] [2]

In 2023, Reynolds won the Margaret A. Edwards Award . [3]

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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

The Kennedy Center Next 50

Jason Reynolds doesn’t write boring books. A #1 New York Times bestselling author of over a dozen young adult novels, Reynolds famously writes to Black children, but for all children.

“Ten years ago, when I first started writing, I thought not writing a boring book was all about action. Now, when I write, I ask myself ‘how can I be honest with myself on the page?’ in the hopes that young people read that honesty as thoughtful and considerate of their lives.”

Based in Washington, DC, where he grew up, Reynolds was inspired by hip hop early on, publishing several poetry collections before debuting his first novel in 2014. After the release of his critically acclaimed novel, Ghost , a National Book Award finalist, Reynolds went on to receive an NAACP Image Award, a Newbery Honor, and multiple Coretta Scott King Awards among other accolades.

As both a poet and author, his prose and poetry practice inform, and some might say, fortify, each other.

“If we think of water as a metaphor for life, then writing a novel is like jumping into a swimming pool and swimming around. Whereas, poetry is me pouring water into a single glass, and making it happen perfectly. Both are explorations of life,” Reynolds says.  “The latter is distilled and specific, while the former has room for exploring the breadth of our lives.”

His novels have been called “both frank and age-appropriate,” spanning topics such as divorce, incarceration, young romance, and racism – topics some might believe are too heavy for young audiences. Thinking about what distinguishes Y.A books from adult fiction, Reynolds believes it begins and ends with tone.

After publishing his latest novels, Look Both Ways, winner of the Carnegie Medal, and Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You , Reynolds looks forward to the one thing that eludes him: balance.

“I look at my life and am proud of what I've accomplished. But, what I've yet to accomplish is balance and rest.”

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Jason Reynolds

Imagination and fortitude.

Last Updated

July 1, 2021

Original Air Date

June 25, 2020

Jason Reynolds is the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature of the Library of Congress — and a magnificent source of wisdom for human society as a whole. He’s driven by compassion and the clear-eyed honesty that the young both possess and demand of the rest of us. Ibram X. Kendi chose him to write the YA companion to Stamped from the Beginning . In his person, Jason Reynolds both embodies and inspires innate human powers of fortitude and imagination. Hear him on “breathlaughter”; the libraries in all of our heads; and a stunning working definition of anti-racism: “simply the muscle that says humans are human… I love you, because you remind me more of myself than not.”

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Reflections

Image by Nathan Bajar , © All Rights Reserved.

Jason Reynolds was appointed National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature by the Library of Congress in January 2020. His body of writing about what it is to be a Black young person growing up in the U.S. has been received as a godsend by teachers and librarians — including the award-winning Ghost , Long Way Down , and Look Both Way s . His most recent work of nonfiction, together with Ibram X. Kendi, is Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You .

Krista Tippett, host: We all know that the best writers for children and young adults speak profoundly to people of every age. I first became aware of and interviewed Jason Reynolds, the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature of the Library of Congress, in 2020. I have come to see him as a magnificent presence and source of wisdom for present human society as a whole. He’s as driven by compassion as he is committed to the clear-eyed honesty that the young both possess and demand of the rest of us. His body of books about what it is to be a Black boy, a Black young person growing up in the U.S., have been received as a godsend by teachers and librarians. And in his person, he lifts up innate human powers of fortitude and imagination. He offers gifts of wisdom and practice, like “breathlaughter” and the libraries in our heads, and a stunning working definition of what anti-racism actually means.

Reynolds: Anti-racism is simply the muscle that says that humans are human. That’s it. It’s the one that says, “I love you because you are you.” Period. And if we can figure out how to do that — and it feels so simple. And this is why racism has been the greatest hoax ever played on humans. It’s the greatest hoax ever, because that element of “I love you because you are you” should be the most human thing we know. It should be a natural thing to say, “Look, I love you, because you remind me more of myself than not.” 

[ music: “Seven League Boots” by Zoë Keating ]

Tippett: I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being .

Jason Reynolds’ many books for middle grade and young adult readers include Ghost, Long Way Down , Look Both Ways , and, most recently, Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You . He was born in Washington D.C. in 1983. 

As you may or may not recall, we got connected on Twitter by a guy named Danté Stewart, a young man who’s a Black seminarian and pastor and preacher, and really a wonderful writer. And he’s a bit younger than you, he’s in his 20s, but he said that he picked up Ghost just a couple of years ago and was immediately drawn by the way you told stories that intersected themes of race, community, social change, failure, insecurity, etc. He said, “It was the story of my life.” So I guess I want to ask you, what was it like to be Jason, growing up? How did this all manifest? What’s with you as you think of, as you walk through these days, about how you started walking in your body as a child?

Reynolds: I think young Jason is always thinking of my mother. I was raised by a fascinating woman. And there were certain things that we learned in the house that molded me. For instance, my mother had no problem saying that, even if it was an ancient belief system, that she had no problem saying, “It doesn’t make sense, so we don’t have to believe that.” [ laughs ] When you’re a kid, you’re like, “Mom, everyone is telling me that my friends who are gay aren’t going to go to heaven.” You’re a kid, and that’s scary. And my mom was like, “Oh, that’s not true.” [ laughs ] And for her, it was like, that’s not true, because it doesn’t make sense. So as a kid, that was all very normal in my house. And it was secretive. My mom would always say, “Look, don’t tell people what we doing in here. The way I’m raising you up might not be up to standard.”

Tippett: [ laughs ] So you had to keep it a secret.

Reynolds: I had to keep it a secret. I had to keep it a secret. And so when I discovered language at the age of ten, through rap music — because I wasn’t a reader. That wasn’t a thing in our house. It’s interesting, my mother, as brilliant as she was and as progressive as she was, she also was a mom raising kids, working long hours and doing all the things that a lot of us have to do, and so reading just wasn’t something that was modeled in our home. And it wasn’t —

Tippett: Somewhere, Ibram X. Kendi, who you wrote this book Stamped with — we’re going to talk about this, but he wrote, he said, “Jason Reynolds and I avoided books like we avoided police officers, growing up in the 1990s.” 

Reynolds: It’s true, no books for me. I mean, and why would I read books, honestly, back in those days? I think — you have the wave, the height of the crack epidemic that’s happening in the last ’80s, early ’90s. Hip-hop is being used as a way to actually fight against it. It’s in response to it, so much of it. The other part of that convergence, that triangulation, was what we now know as HIV and AIDS. Two of my neighbors died of AIDS on my block. I had family members who were addicted to crack cocaine during that time. I have an older brother who all he was doing was listening to rap music. All of this is happening, and there’s a ten-year-old child in the middle of it, and there are no books about any of it. And so reading just wasn’t my jam. It wasn’t for me. So I studied rap lyrics, liner notes. I would open up cassette tapes, and I would unfold the liner notes, and I would read what the rappers were rapping.

Tippett: Which is poetry. Rap lyrics are poetry.

Reynolds: Thank you for saying it.

Tippett: So you were reading poetry.

Reynolds: I was reading poetry. And that’s all it took. I didn’t want to be a rapper, I wanted to be a poet. I wanted to write it down. And that was sort of the beginning of all this. And so when you combine that with my mother’s pouring into us that, look, you can say whatever you want to say, you can feel however you want to feel, you can research and study whatever you want to research and study, you can believe whatever you want to believe, this gave me the platform to put forth my young, curious ideas, as a 10-, 11-, 12-year-old.

Tippett: It’s interesting, I was looking at Kojo Nnamdi, who’s such a great…

Reynolds: Oh, he’s awesome.

Tippett: … public radio host in D.C., who interviewed you actually not that long ago — early June?

Reynolds: Oh, yeah, all the time.

Tippett: I mean, I’m sure he’s interviewed you a lot.

Reynolds: Last week.

Tippett: Last week, with kids, with your readers. But — and I don’t know if it was in this context or another, but there was a librarian in D.C. — maybe this was something written about you, talking about how before your books came along, what she was doing with kids in her library was analyzing rap lyrics.

Reynolds: That’s the way.

Tippett: To listen to that show, where kids called in to name their questions with you — “I’m scared of being a Black person. What should I do?” “Why do people still hurt Black people?” “I’m nine years old. My question is, I’m scared. How can kids help bring change in this country, so we’re all treated fairly and it doesn’t matter what color your skin is?” I just wanted to put those questions out there and name that that’s what you’re writing into or toward, for.

Reynolds: Krista, it’s been — I wish I could tell you that that was the first time I’ve heard those questions. But the truth is that I’ve been doing this work a long time — at this point, I’ve spoken to probably a million kids around this country and parts of the world — and those questions come. I’ve had a little girl in Philly, so sweet, and she made me bend down so she can whisper in my ear, do I ever wish that my skin was different?, because of what she felt, what she was dealing with. Or I’ve had young people tell me about their brothers and sisters being killed by police officers, or — I mean, this is very real. 

And my job is to love them. And if I claim to love them — because all of us claim to love our kids, but I think sometimes, our love sometimes gets conflated with our fear. And that’s OK — I understand that fear is real. But for me, my own personal opinion is that if I love them, I have to tell them the truth. I have to figure out how to tell them the truth: one, because a lot of these kids can handle it. I think we spend so much time trying to protect our children that we —

Tippett: Also, because they see it.

Reynolds: They see it.

Tippett: They see it. They know it. And this is true of kids altogether, everything that’s going on that adults think they’re shielding them from.

Reynolds: But they’re not. They know. And so if they know, and we’re not helping them process, now it’s become more dangerous than you’ve ever imagined. So we have an opportunity to lean into the discomfort of having to talk to kids about this, in order for them to find language around it. And honestly, I don’t want — I always tell young people, racism is nothing to make sense of. That’s the complicated part about it. [ laughs ] That’s why it’s such a strange conversation. It’s nothing to make sense of. But we do have to lean into having a discussion about how nonsensical it is.

Tippett: I think that language of helping kids process — one place, you said you don’t write pain porn or trauma porn. And boy, we are addicted to that stuff in this society, like true crime. But the stories you tell have a lot of pain in them, and they have a lot of trauma in them. I wonder, how would you talk about that line? What are the different ingredients that go into that line between telling the hard, true stories?

Reynolds: I think, for me — look, trauma is real. Pain is real. But it is not omnipresent. It isn’t something that governs my life, and it especially doesn’t govern the lives of children. I think it is disingenuous to write it. I think it’s hack work, because the truth is that if you know children, children — who are the most human amongst us, by the way — children always find a way to laugh. Children always find a way. If you’re talking to a 14-year-old, no matter what’s going on, a 14-year-old is trying to figure out where the joke is. They’re trying to figure out when the opportunity comes for the sad part to be over so that they can roast their best friends. 

I think that the fervent nature of finding humor and lightness and levity is a remarkable gift of youth, honestly. And so for me, I’m not interested — look, I write that which I believe is real and things that happen, and I don’t want to shy away from things that are complicated and tough, but I also want to write whole stories about whole people. I think sometimes we reduce children and young people to half-formed things, and so we write half-formed stories about them. 

And even that ties to the way people talk about children’s literature. People talk about children’s literature as if it is a category that is full of half-formed work, but that’s because they too believe that children are half-formed. [ laughs ] And so I think those of us who acknowledge the humanity of young people, those of us who acknowledge the complexity and the beauty and sophistication of childhood know that when you’re writing it, all those elements have to be present.

Tippett: I want to talk about some of the ways that you get at this, because I think these are important tools for all the rest of us — and parents and teachers, but all of us. You talk about using synonyms when you’re helping kids process and letting them come up with synonyms. And one that I was so intrigued by that you used is a made-up synonym for “freedom,” is — this is one word — “breathlaughter.”

Reynolds: Breathlaughter, yeah. Oh, it sounds good, doesn’t it? [ laughs ] I think, for me — look, my whole life is around figuring out — is playing around with the alchemy of language. That’s my whole jam. I want to figure, what exactly are the chemical reactions that take place when you put this word next to this word? That’s something that — I think about the poet John Ashbery, that was his whole thing. It’s like, I don’t know what this means, but if you put these two words together, what does it make you feel? And I’m curious about that.

So you take something like freedom. What could be a synonym for freedom? And I made up the word breathlaughter, because there’s something about the idea, for me, that — when I think of breath, I think of life, but I also think of, it doesn’t stop. So if you exhale, what comes out of your mouth spreads and spreads and spreads. It goes and goes and goes and goes. And that’s something to think about. It’s something to think about, what happens when we breathe out or breathe in. It’s also interesting to think about that we’re breathing in, and then breathing out, which means it’s a constant recycling of energy. What an amazing thing to think about, just constant recycling of energy. 

And so what if laughter could also be recycled in that way? What if it could just go? That is freedom, to me, if it could just go and go and go and go and go — if it could be the ripple in the water. To me, that feels free. Now, physically free, that’s a different conversation. But that feels like freedom to me, so yeah.

[ music: “I’m 9 Today” by múm ]

Tippett: I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being . Today I’m with Jason Reynolds, the celebrated young writer of books for middle schoolers and young adults, with wisdom for all humans.  

Something I really appreciate in your work, in your philosophy of writing, in what you write, is a reverence you have for the power of words and ideas. I grew up in the middle of the country — this is not related to race — this is a very American thing, this anti-intellectualism, this mistrusting of the life of the mind. And so I watched this — what’s your title? You are the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature of the Library of Congress — what a fabulous title. I watched you give a speech — was it for the Library of Congress or librarians? And you talked about libraries as sacred spaces and librarians as architects, and what if libraries are warehouses where we build human libraries and that the questions kids have get stored on the shelves and passed around and loaned out to others? [ laughs ] And you talked about the reference desks we have in our heads. And this piece of it that you’re calling out — it is, it’s countercultural in a strange way that we don’t reflect on in American culture and feels really essential, to me. Do you know what I’m talking about?

Reynolds: I do. I do. I think — and that’s interesting, because no one ever talks about that speech, because I — ultimately, I think that my role, for as long as I am on this plane and as long as I am doing this work, my role will always be to figure out how to create fortitude in the minds and bodies and spirits of young people. I’m trying to fortify them. It’s also the reason why I do so much around imagination — this is a big deal for me — or why I do the whole “let’s create synonyms,” because at the end of the day, ultimately, I need young people — we, the collective we need young people to be able to activate their imaginations. If they cannot, if they don’t have — if, by the time you’re out of high school, your imagination is shot, we’re in trouble, bigtime. We’re in trouble.

But how does one keep an imagination fresh in a world that works double-time to suck it away? How does one keep an imagination firing off when we live in a nation that is constantly vacuuming it from them? And I think that the answer is, one must live a curious life. One must have stacks and stacks and stacks of books on the inside of their bodies. And those books don’t have to be the things that you’ve read. I mean, that’s good, too, but those books could be the conversations that you’ve had with your friends that are unlike the conversations you were having last week. It could be about this time taking the long way home and seeing what’s around you that you’ve never seen, because most of us, especially city folk, we stay in our little quadrants. We stay on the five-block radius, wherever the coffeeshop is and the school and the church. 

But what if you were to walk the other way? What if you were to explore the places around you? What if you were to speak to your neighbor and to figure out how to strike a conversation with a person you’ve never met? What if you were to try to walk into a situation, free of preconceived notion, just once? Once a day, just walk in and say, “I don’t know what’s going to happen, and let’s see. Let me give this person the benefit of the doubt — to be a human.”

Tippett: Well, can I just say one thing about that? I was just thinking recently about the word “repentance” — I just think you might like this, because you like words — that repentance, in the Greek and the Hebrew, it is not about a private conversion. The word is kinetic. The word actually is about stopping in your tracks and walking another way, which is what you just described as a way to talk about — I think in some ways the way you said it is very simple, in the sense that it’s very manageable, like stepping out of our neighborhoods.

Reynolds: That’s it. [ laughs ] But isn’t that the thing? This is also why I work with young people and why I love young people, is because they haven’t complicated life yet. If you ask a young person, “What advice would you give a white person right now, in the midst of all the things that are happening?” And that young person, especially a young Black person, would say, “Oh, ‘Stop being racist.’”

Tippett: [ laughs ] Right.

Reynolds: [ laughs ] Right? Because for them, it’s very much so, why are we complicating this conversation? Let’s figure out whatever — the shortest distance between A and B is a straight line, so let’s just do the straight-line way and say, “Here’s what you could do. Stop being racist right now. It’s on you to figure out what that means, but that’s the answer.” [ laughs ]

Tippett: It’s like Oliver Wendell Holmes: “the simplicity that lies on the other side of complexity.”

Reynolds: [ laughs ] That’s what I’m searching for, what I’m trying to push for. Just step out your neighborhood. Just talk to somebody different, because we underestimate what this does for the mind. That’s all. We underestimate what it does for the imagination. And as long as those imaginations are firing off, then their libraries will continue to be filled.

Somebody told me at that same lecture — it cuts off when you watch it on the internet, but at the same lecture, when we got to the Q&A part, a woman stood up and she said, “Have you ever been to Senegal?” And I said no. And she said, “Do you know any Senegalese people?” I said, I do. And she said, “You should ask them about what they say whenever an elder has died in the community.” And I said, “What do they say?” “They say that a library has burned.” Now, I didn’t know this.

Tippett: Wow.

Reynolds: But isn’t that something? “A library has burned.”

Tippett: Yes. Oh, my. 

So in the year 2020, before 2020 became 2020, you published this book with Ibram X. Kendi called Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You . It is a — you call it a remix of his book Stamped from the Beginning . When did this book actually get published?

Reynolds: March 8.

Tippett: It was March — oh my God. Really? The week of the lockdown.

Reynolds: In the exact — we were on tour. [ laughs ]

Tippett: So I think following on what we’ve just been talking about, this book is about ideas, but it’s about what has formed our imaginations …

Reynolds: Correct.

Tippett: … which has formed our lives, which has formed our symbols, which has formed the way we, in granular ways, structure and organize our life together.

Reynolds: Absolutely. I mean, this book is — it’s interesting, because no one’s ever talked about it that way. Good on you, Krista. No one’s ever talked about it that way, I think. I think usually people talk about, well, this is the history of a thing. And it is, but that history is birthed out of the imagination. It literally was conjured up. We’re talking about — imagination is so powerful that it could set forth 400, 500 years of something wrong, which means that it very well could set forth 400, 500 years of something right. 

That’s sort of the beauty of humanity. James Baldwin, my famous Baldwin quote, and he has a gazillion, obviously. But my favorite Baldwin quote is, “The interior life is the real life.” The interior life is the real life. “And the intangible dreams of a person may have a tangible effect on the world.” It’s basically saying, what one can imagine, internally, what one can think about when nobody knows, when nobody’s around — one’s secrets — could shift human life. What an amazing thing to think about.

And my role, even with Stamped and remixing — and the reason we called it a remix is because it’s not a YA adaptation, because I actually rewrote the entire book. I wanted — we, he and I both — wanted to figure out how we could tap into the imagination of young people. And when it comes to books around race, or when it comes to history books, usually they are presented to students, not humans.

Tippett: Right. That’s a great distinction.

Reynolds: And I think we wanted to make something the first of its kind, something that was literally made thinking about a 12-year-old or a 14-year-old or a 16-year-old — what they would want to read and how to engage them so that they actually can store new language, new lexicon, new vocabulary, new histories in their personal libraries.

[ music: “Lemon Tea” by Gyvus ]

Tippett: After a short break, more with Jason Reynolds. 

I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being , today with the preternaturally wise, wonderful National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, Jason Reynolds. His award-winning novels for middle grade and young adult readers include Ghost and Long Way Down . And at the invitation of Ibram X. Kendi, he took Kendi’s history of racism and wrote a YA version called Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You .

So basically, just to reinforce what you said a minute ago, this story of race and racism and of us — how it has distorted, shaped and distorted all of us — is just an incredibly powerful, negative example of the power of ideas and words and writing, of turning something into a story that is heard and believed and internalized and lived.

Reynolds: Look, if there’s anything I’ve learned, and if there’s any more of a reason that I am motivated, encouraged to do the work that I’m doing, it’s because I have proof that in the 1400s, it was narrative that proliferated racism. It was narrative that proliferated the idea of a justified slavery, a justified enslavement of African people.

Tippett: You name Gomes Eanes de Zurara as the first racist.

Reynolds: He’s the first racist.

Tippett: It’s not a name I ever heard.

Reynolds: And nor had I, before I read Stamped from the Beginning — as we call it, “ Stamped , Sr.” — Gomes Eanes de Zurara, the world’s first racist. But the reason why he’s the world’s first racist isn’t because he’s the first person to believe that African people should be enslaved. That’s not the reason he’s the first racist. He actually was only the scribe. He was the author. He was the one who basically said, “Listen, I have an opportunity to spin the story, because everybody is enslaving people over here in Europe, but the way that we’re going to justify our enslavement of innocent African people is by saying that it is salvific enslavement. It is an opportunity for us to civilize and Christianize the ‘heathen.’ And so I’m going to write a narrative that is expressing that that is what we are doing.” And it is in the writing down of the thing that it is crystallized and then proliferated around the world. He basically twisted it and manipulated it into something that it was not and was able to create justified abuse.

Tippett: Yeah, and when I read your book — and I keep thinking of growing up in Oklahoma, in a small town, and even how we would read about the Trail of Tears, which led to our state, or the history that you’re telling that we all learned about. I mean, there’s a lot of stuff in this book that we didn’t learn, but the Three-fifths Compromise — that five slaves equaled three humans — so that slaves were human and subhuman, and that this was a power play in which both the North and the South participated. [Editor’s note: The Three-fifths Compromise stated that non-free persons were counted as three-fifths of a free individual for the purposes of determining congressional representation, not five slaves equaled to three humans as said here.]

Tippett: And we could use so many examples. But I look back, and I don’t know why we didn’t — why were we sitting there? Why were teachers teaching it, and why were we just sitting there, taking it in? Because it doesn’t make sense — I mean, it’s terrible, not just that it doesn’t make sense. It’s awful. It’s absurd. 

And you do something in the book, the Stamped book, where you stop at something, and you do a pause — [ laughs ] a huge pause, like capital letters, bigger font. You do “PAUSE,” you do “TAKE A BREATH,” and you’ll also, sometimes, “UNPAUSE.” And to me, that is a narrative technique, but I almost feel like it’s an offering. It’s almost like a narrative technique we need from now on.

Reynolds: So I’ve had these conversations before, for other books that I’ve written. All American Boys was a book about police brutality that I toured for years and years. So we were having these conversations in person, and so public forums, public spaces, thousands of people, and places that I normally had not been, and my mother would have advised against. [ laughs ] And what I noticed is that it —

Tippett: And that’s her job, and that’s your job to defy her.

Reynolds: That is her job. And it’s my job to say, “I’ve got to do what I’ve got to do. You raised me to do what I have to do.” But one thing I noticed is the discomfort. 

You know, for a long time, if you even said the word “white” in public around white people, you could feel all the air in the room sort of suck out of the room. You could feel — it’s like, we can’t even say these labels that are used just as descriptors. We can’t even say that. So how are we ever going to have a bigger conversation, when I can’t even say “white” and “Black”?

And so I what I wanted to — I understood that, going into the making of this book, and so what I wanted to do was figure out how to eliminate all excuse to backpedal out of the pages. I needed to make sure that no one closed the book. So no matter how heavy the topic was, I understood that there were going to be people who read this, who got so uncomfortable and so vexed over a thing that they did not know that affects their lives — particularly, affects their lives for the positive in ways that they did not know. I didn’t want them to — that human thing that we do, which is defensive. I didn’t want the defense mechanisms to kick in, and then they say, “I can’t read. This is not for me.” So instead I’d say, “Look, let’s pause. Take a break. Take a breath,” as a way to re-center. I’ve watched my mother’s — back in the day, my mother’s meditation circles and all these people — I watched that moment of people being like, “Let’s re-center. Let’s take a second.”

Tippett: You also say “breath-breaks,” breath-breaks and pauses.

Reynolds: “Let’s take a breath. Let’s take a moment. Everyone is still here. We’re all still alive. Everyone’s all right. But we gotta keep moving forward. So take a breath, get yourself together, and we’ll push on” — especially since I’m dealing with kids. I love kids, all kids. I love all the children. At the end of the day, I think that’s our one vested interest. No matter what you think, everybody wants children to be OK. And so in order for me to make sure, again, that I’m being responsible — if I’m going to dump all this information, some of which can be really world-shattering for some people, when they find out some of this stuff — I need to also — for young people, especially — put some mattress there to say, “Look, this is all very true, but I love you. And so let’s take a second. Let’s do a temperature check to make sure that you’re all right, and then we can keep it pushing.”

Tippett: One thing that you’ve said a lot — you’re calling the society and white people to not just focus on the young people of color it is convenient and comfortable to love.

Reynolds: Ah, yes. Recently, I’ve been thinking about this a lot. You hear people all the time, like, “Oh, I’m not racist. I’ve got white friends.” It’s almost a joke, at this point, [ laughs ] like people — “I can’t be racist!”

Tippett: One thing you said about Thomas Jefferson is —

Reynolds: He’s the father of that. [ laughs ]

Tippett: He’s the first person who said, “I have Black friends.”

Reynolds: He’s the very first person that ever said he got Black friends. He’s gotta be. But I think that idea that “I’ve got Black friends. I can’t be racist, I’ve got Black friends.” Or I know people who have Black children. “I can’t be racist, I have Black children.” Or “I have a Black partner.” 

And the way I always try to explain it to people is, I have so many women friends who — specifically, my heterosexual women friends — who say, “If you want to know how a man is going to treat you, just look at how he treats his mother, and then you’ll know whether or not he’s good or not.” And my reply to that is, “That is ridiculous, because that man sees his mother as exceptional. That’s his mother. [ laughs ] You’re not his mother.” [ laughs ] And so when I think about —

Tippett: I’ve said that to my daughter, I will confess.

Reynolds: But think about it. But you’re not his mom. He sees his mom as exceptional, and that is the reason why he treats her the way he treats her. And so when we think about this idea of the Black friend, it’s not that you’re not racist. It’s that you somehow have aligned yourself with who you believe is an exceptional Black person. And that is the problem.

Tippett: And that is not the work.

Reynolds: These are Black people who are convenient for you to love. But the truth is that the kid on your block, the one that you’re scared to walk past, you gotta love him, too. You gotta love him, too. The ones who are locked in juvenile detention centers — unfairly, most of the time, doing hard time, because America has hard time for children, one of the only countries that have maximum security youth prisons — you gotta love them, too. You gotta love them, too. The ones who blast their music coming down your block, and you can’t understand why they gotta turn the music — you gotta push back against everything in you that wants to see something wrong with them and love them, too. If not, then it doesn’t matter how many Black friends you have, it’s a specific kind of Black person that you’re OK with, not Black people. And that’s the difference.

[ music: “Pedalrider” by Blue Dot Sessions ]

I’ve been thinking a lot about rage …

Reynolds: Me, too. [ laughs ]

Tippett: … and the word “rage,” which is kind of in our public vocabulary, sitting there unsure of itself, but it’s there, and there’s a sense that it’s rightly there. I want to read you some lines from this young man, Danté Stewart, who turned me onto you.

Reynolds: Please.

Tippett: He wrote something in Sojourners about Black rage. He’s a seminarian. He’s a preacher and pastor. “Black rage in an anti-Black world is a spiritual virtue. Rage shakes us out of our illusion that the world as it is, is what God wants. Rage forces us to deal with the gross system of inequality, exploitation, and disrespect. Rage is the public cry for Black dignity. It becomes the public expression of a theological truth that Black lives matter to God.”

Reynolds: Wow. I’m with him. I think we have a hard time addressing rage. And I think he’s right. I think it is a virtue. I think it’s important. I have — one of my best friends in the world, Myisha Cherry, she’s a philosopher. And she writes about the philosophy of anger, the philosophy of rage, the philosophy of forgiveness. And there is something theoretical and theological about rage. And I think we raise our young people to try to avoid it. 

And I think — look, I believe that we are — so many people are so scared, for all kinds of reasons, that they are raising young people to not feel their feelings to the fullest extent. And then, when those young people are 25, it’s interesting because then, I believe, that rage becomes reactionary rage and not a conscious rage. Black folks have a right to have a conscious rage — a conscious rage. I mean, Baldwin always talks about it. If you are a Black person who is conscious in America, then you are basically living in a state of anger. [ laughs ] You are living in a state of anger. It is a conscious and constant thing.

The other thing, though, I will say, the only thing I will add, and not as a pushback but as an addendum, is that if it is not a conscious rage — meaning, if it is not a rage that we can tap into, a rage that exists within the quiver of our lives, along with the joy — then it can very well poison us and overtake us. And it can become an illness. It can cause illness. So reactionary rage is a dangerous thing. But to be able to tap into a conscious rage, I think, is a gift. And I do believe it is a virtue.

Tippett: I’m thinking about the Psalms and how they’re full of, actually, murderous rage.

Reynolds: [ laughs ] They are. I mean the power of poetry, right? [ laughs ] The power of poetry. I think rage is — I feel rage now. But one has to know how to wield it. And I think, for me, I choose to put my rage into the energy of helping young people process the world around them. But it comes from a place of rage, and that rage is connected to a love, a true love, an aching love that I have for young people to grow into the people who will push forward freedom and anti-racism and an equitable world. 

I think they have it. I think they want it, in a way that we’ve never seen before — I mean, even just the way that they’re thinking about saving the planet. I think that their environmental foresight does not stop with vegetation and atmospheric happenings of the space in which we live. I think it also has to do with all natural elements, including human beings. When they’re talking about environmental change, I really do think that many of them want to change the environment — literally, shift the landscape. That does not exclude humanity. [ laughs ]

I mean, Krista, if you think about it, if you think about their generation — and I say this often, because I think it’s important — their generation is teased and ridiculed and criticized for being too empathetic, as if that’s a bad thing. And all of us who tease them and ridicule them because they have somehow made our lives a bit more complicated and uncomfortable, because now we have to watch what we say, we have to be careful of — think about that. We have to be careful about making other people feel small, and we’re upset about it. We will have egg on our faces 20 years from now, because what they’re saying is, “We are trying to make an equitable world. We want to make a world where everyone feels safe and free.” And we ridicule them for it. So strange. [ laughs ]

Tippett: I want to ask you about this, too, because I hear you almost identifying with the oldsters. How old are you — in your 30s?

Reynolds: Thirty-six.

Tippett: Thirty-six. But here’s why. I think — in the ’60s, also, I’ve heard people say this, people said, “Oh, the young will save us.” But what I feel really strongly is, as radical as they are, our young people, we have to walk alongside them. They deserve to be accompanied. And even this move that you help young people make — of stopping and taking a breath — that’s not natural when you’re 12 or 16 or 22. And, actually, that’s part of the strength of being 12 or 16 or 22. It’s that impatience, that holy impatience, that wise impatience. But the history of radicalism — the ’60s just burned out in cynicism. It gave us hedge funds. 

And so I do feel like — I wonder how you would talk to the rest of us, who are not identifying as young people, who are looking at that generation and praising them and talking about how amazing they are — oh my God, they have a hard road ahead. We all have a hard road ahead. But what is our work to accompany them towards — I love your word, “fortitude” — so that they can really grow into the fullness of their imaginations and their power?

Reynolds: Fantastic question. So first and foremost, I think there are, like you said, there are some older folks who are encouraging and who are like, “Yeah, go out there and get ‘em.” But I think there are actually more older folks who are like, “Y’all don’t know what y’all doing,” or saying, “All y’all do is buck back.” So to them, first of all, I say, no one wants to live in a world where young people are not irreverent, first and foremost. A world where young people are not irreverent is not a world for me, because it is a world that is not growing. They have to shake the table. If you like your young person’s art and music, your young people are doing something wrong. The truth is that — right? It’s just the natural order of things. It’s the natural order of things. It is their time to mold what they want the world to look like.

So what’s our role, is the question. And our role, I think, in this moment, it isn’t just — I’ve heard people say, “We got to get out the way.” Here’s the thing. I think that they don’t want us out the way. Despite what you may hear, it’s not that they want us out the way, I think what they want for us to do is to listen to them, because I think — what I’ve learned over the years is that when we talk about entitlement, what we do is we say that young people are so entitled, yet I don’t know a group of people more entitled than adults and older people. I mean, we really believe that we deserve their respect simply because we have years on them, and the truth is that that respect must be earned. And I think what they’re saying is, “Please, make a seat for me at the table. You can’t talk about my life and not include me. You have to make a seat for me at the table.”

That is our role in this movement. It’s that simple. It’s like, look, I am here. If you need help, you need strategy planning, you need to understand how this works, you need some historical reference and context, I’m here to do all those things.

Tippett: You need somebody to help you take some breaths …

Reynolds: You need somebody to help you take some breaths, you need somebody to help you make sandwiches and make sure that you all got the proper shoes on, these simple things, and if you’re going to walk into harm’s way, I’m going to pull your coattail and say, “Hey, hey, hey, are we certain? Let’s go over the rules. Let’s make sure that we are doing what we want to be doing.” But if you are emotionally broken, if something happens that hurts you emotionally, then it’s my job to step in and say, “Let’s process what has happened. Let’s figure out where the failure is. Let’s figure out how to grow from it, how to get strong, and then we need to get back out into the street.” 

That’s the role of the elders right now, not “Follow me,” not “This is the way I did it,” not “You guys are doing it wrong,” not — no, no, no, that doesn’t work. It’s like, “Look, I’m with you. Tell me what you want me to do. Tell me where you want me to go. If I see the fire coming, I’m going to say, there goes the fire. I’ve seen fire before. Let’s head this way.” That’s it. [ laughs ]

Tippett: That’s so good. So helpful.

So one thing — as you know, one thing that feels scary for people, for white people right now, is saying the wrong thing. It’s kind of similar to what you just said — we have to make space in our life together to be learning and growing, and that means that people will fail. And we have to find ways to rehumanize and welcome failure that turns into growth.

But anyway, I just want to name, and it feels a little scary to name this, that I get troubled by the language of “anti-racism” as the main word or the main goal, because it’s a negative-negative.

Reynolds: [ laughs ] That’s great.

Tippett: And I actually — I’m coming to terms with the fact that this is the thing we have to reckon with right now and become, is anti-racist. But it’s not — it can’t be the end. That’s not — so I’m curious what you think about that. 

But it also, to me, it goes together with the question I wanted to ask you. One way to describe all of this reflection in the book — in Stamped , but in all of your work — is just opening up this question of what it means to be human, fully human, and seeing that more fully. So how would you start to talk about what it means to be fully human, how that’s evolving in you, and what that has to do with anti-racism?

Reynolds: What does it mean to be human — [ laughs ] which is like, it’s like being asked, “What’s the meaning of life?”

Tippett: I know. I know. So just how would you start to answer it right now, this morning, on this Monday.

Reynolds: For me, I think it means to be changing. It means to be evolving. I think that’s the part about humanity that excites me the most, is that it’s malleable. It shifts. It changes. The ways of life can change at any given moment, and we can adapt to said ways of life. It means — I always talk about indoctrination. Human beings have been indoctrinated. And so if we’ve been indoctrinated, then that means that we can also make new doctrine and then be re-indoctrinated, I think. And so how it connects to anti-racism is that, in and of itself. 

First and foremost, I have to say this. No one is actually — because my friends, my white friends, especially, are like, “Yo, I’m trying to become anti-racist.” That’s not a thing. So I want to make sure that we’re clear.

Tippett: Right, it’s not a thing. It’s to not be a thing.

Reynolds: Not like that, Krista. I know the language is tripping you up. [ laughs ] What I’m saying is, there’s no finish line, is what I’m saying. There’s no finish line. So there’s no finish line. There’s this idea that people are going to read this book, or they’re going to read all the books, and then, all of a sudden, they’re going to “be” anti-racist. And what I’m saying is — and that’s also a very American thing, this idea that there are winners and losers, that there’s a binary that we live in, a bifurcation when it comes to that which is a failure and that which is victorious. 

The truth of the matter is, this is about journeymen, journeyfolk. Our job is to constantly be pressing toward a thing, but that thing is ever elusive. And the reason why it is ever elusive is because the world, and humanity, continues to evolve. And because it continues to evolve, the things that complicate our lives evolve with it. And so we have to be vigilant, to continue to figure out what the new versions of these elements are so that we can continue to tear down that house. But there’s no end goal. There’s no — and I think that’s how humanity and anti-racism connect.

Tippett: So anti-racism is this muscle …

Reynolds: It’s a muscle that has to be developed.

Tippett: … that is with us at every step of the journey.

Reynolds: And it’s simply — and by the way, to get back to your original question, anti-racism is simply the muscle that says that humans are human. That’s it. It’s the one that says, “I love you because you are you.” Period. That’s all. And if we can figure out how to do that — and it feels so simple. And this is why racism has been the greatest hoax ever played on humans. It’s the greatest hoax ever, because that element of “I love you because you are you” should be the most human thing we know. It should be a natural thing to say, “Look, I love you, because you remind me more of myself than not.” [ laughs ]

Tippett: I really appreciate you, and I’m just really happy that this is how I got to spend this Monday morning.

Reynolds: Me, too. Thank you so much, Krista.

[ music: “Revolve In the Sun” by Biche ]

Tippett: Jason Reynolds was appointed National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature by the Library of Congress in January, 2020. His many award-winning books include Ghost , Long Way Down , Look Both Ways , and, most recently, Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You . 

The On Being Project is located on Dakota land. Our lovely theme music is provided and composed by Zoë Keating. And the last voice that you hear singing at the end of our show is Cameron Kinghorn.

On Being is an independent, nonprofit production of The On Being Project. It is distributed to public radio stations by WNYC Studios. I created this show at American Public Media.

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Books & Music

Recommended reading, stamped: racism, antiracism, and you: a remix of the national book award-winning stamped from the beginning.

Author: Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi

Look Both Ways: A Tale Told in Ten Blocks

Author: Jason Reynolds

Long Way Down

Miles Morales: Spider-Man

All American Boys

As Brave as You

When I was the Greatest

The On Being Project is an affiliate partner of Bookshop.org and Amazon.com. Any earnings we receive through these affiliate partnerships go into directly supporting The On Being Project.

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Yesterday Was Dramatic – Today Is OK

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Chillhop Essentials Summer 2017

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Artist: Blue Dot Sessions

Notwithstanding

Artist: Bichi

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March 26, 2020

Tending Joy and Practicing Delight

In this unsettled moment, we’re returning to the shows we’re longing to hear again. Among them is this 2019 conversation with writer Ross Gay. The ephemeral nature of our being allows him to find delight in all sorts of places (especially his community garden). To be with Gay is to train your gaze to see the wonderful alongside the terrible; to attend to and meditate on what you love, even in the midst of difficult realities and as part of working for justice.

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In the past two decades, Jason Reynolds has published more than 20 volumes of poetry, novels (including a novel for Marvel) and short stories, in which he grapples with the experiences of Black and brown communities in America. His output has won him multiple awards and led to him being the US National Ambassador of Young People’s Literature from 2020 to 2022; Publishers Weekly once described him as the “hardest-working man in Washington”. Yet even now, “I don’t try to understand my process as an artist,” says the Maryland‑raised 40-year-old, best-known for his Track series of young-adult novels. “If I put everything into a person – some love, some fear, some ambition, some pain, and all the other elements that make humans human, then the character will inform me of their world, their journey. It will be an adventure.”

Reynolds first discovered “the magic of language” through rap music . He lists 2Pac, Notorious BIG and Queen Latifah amongst his early literary heroes – artists who spoke to his reality as a Black kid far more than books ever did. Today, the musical influence is felt in his preference for writing in free verse. “My quiver is full of many arrows, but rap and hip-hop still sits at the core of who I am,” he says. 

Rap culture was also what drew him to Cartier . He recalls a moment in the ’90s when everyone was wearing Cartier sunglasses; the name of the brand became lodged in his mind. The beauty of Cartier objects, Reynolds observes, lies in the simple sophistication. Products such as the Love bracelet or the Trinity ring, which is made of three interwoven metals, require little explanation. “The designs are so good, we’re willing to go along for the ride and feel what that thing makes us feel.” Most importantly, though, he equates the power of finally seeing yourself represented in literature to wearing Cartier, a brand which he says “often gets pegged a certain way”. It’s about acknowledgement, he says; having the ability to say, “I’m someone who wears Cartier too. We with it too. We belong here too.”

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212 posts jason reynolds's blog, day 30 of 30.

WHEN THEY BURY TONY ALLEN

let there be silence first just for a moment while we stretch our skin across this barrel of an earth

this headless and assless cavity just for a moment while we stretch our skin across the splintered wood

of history brown from bucktown to trenchtown just for a moment while we stretch our skin from trenchtown to lagos

to brixton the epidermis of everything just for a moment whi

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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.

Jason Reynolds

TRANSCRIPT: JASON REYNOLDS INTERVIEW

THE THREAD SEASON ONE

JASON REYNOLDS

Jason Reynolds was born in Washington, DC and raised in neighboring Oxon Hill, Maryland, Reynolds found inspiration in rap to begin writing poetry at nine years old. He focused on poetry for approximately the next two decades, only reading a novel cover to cover for the first time at age 17 and publishing several poetry collections before he published his own first novel, When I Was The Greatest , in 2014. He won the Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe Award for New Talent for this first work of prose and seven more novels followed in the next four years, including Ghost (2016) and two more books in what became his New York Times best-selling Track series, Patina (2017) and Sunny (2018); As Brave As You (2016), winner of the 2016 Kirkus Prize, the 2017 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work for Youth/Teen, and the 2017 Schneider Family Book Award; and a Marvel Comics novel called Miles Morales: Spider-Man (2017). Reynolds returned to poetry with Long Way Down (2017), a novel in verse which was named a Newbery Honor book, a Printz Honor Book, and best young adult work by the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Awards. The recipient of a Newbery Honor, a Printz Honor,  and an NAACP Image Award, Reynolds is also the 2020-2022 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. He has appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, Late Night with Seth Meyers, CBS Sunday Morning,  and Good Morning America. He is on faculty at Lesley University, for the Writing for Young People MFA Program and lives in Washington, DC.

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‘I’ve been banned since the beginning’: Jason Reynolds talks to Joseph Coelho

The UK children’s laureate and America’s ambassador for young people’s literature discuss finding a voice and how to get kids reading

J oseph Coelho and Jason Reynolds have plenty in common. Both are award-winning authors who are currently national representatives for children’s literature: earlier this year, Coelho became the UK children’s laureate, while Reynolds holds the equivalent role in the US, the national ambassador for young people’s literature. They are around the same age (Coelho is 42 and Reynolds is 38), both found a love for words through poetry, and both are Black writers passionate about making the white-dominated world of children’s books more diverse. They also both never read books as young children.

Coelho grew up in a single parent family in Roehampton, south-west London, with “a teen mother who was doing her best, but had herself left school at a very young age”. He wasn’t read to at home, and couldn’t read properly until he was about seven or eight. At that point, he managed to catch up with his peers and found a love of books through his local library’s summer reading challenge . An inspirational school visit from “the late great” Jean “Binta” Breeze made him realise that he could be a writer too, and ultimately sparked his career as a poet and picture-book author.

Reynolds, meanwhile, grew up in Oxon Hill, Maryland, and didn’t read books until even later, when he was 17 or 18, although before that he used to read the liner notes of rap cassettes. He identifies the album Black Reign by Queen Latifah as the reason he became an author, writing poetry first, and then the novels for children and teenagers for which he is now best known.

The pair, both dressed in all black, are meeting during their brief overlap in tenures: Coelho became laureate earlier this year, and will stay in the role until 2024, while Reynolds started his two-year ambassadorship in January 2020: “I’m just about to bow out!” Each writer is endearingly impressed by the other.

“Can I call you Joe?”, Reynolds checks, before admitting that he has “done all this research” on Coelho and is “super happy” that he has been chosen as laureate. The British author is quick to return the compliment, declaring himself a big fan of Reynolds.

Both authors laugh when I ask them if they were exposed to books by people of colour as children. It wasn’t until secondary school that Coelho studied a book by someone who wasn’t white, he says. “It’s really hard to put across the impact of that.” Now that the two writers have a chance to make a difference to children’s reading opportunities, they are passionate about making sure that young people from every kind of background are represented in the books they read. “You can’t be what you can’t see,” says Reynolds, who is sure he would have started reading sooner had he seen himself in the books he was being offered. When he was a child, authors were such a distant concept to him that he believed books were written by machines. “And these machines apparently didn’t know I existed.”

Reynolds, who now lives in Washington DC, was writing for years before he got his break with his 2014 YA novel When I Was the Greatest, about three Black teenage boys growing up in Brooklyn.

Since then, he has published eight more novels in four years, including the New York Times bestselling Track series and the novel-in-verse Long Way Down, which was later adapted by Danica Novgorodoff into a Kate Greenaway award-winning graphic novel. In 2019 he published the Carnegie-winning Look Both Ways, a collection of interlinked short stories about walking home from school. His most recent book, Oxygen Mask, published earlier this year, is an astonishing graphic novel created with his long-time collaborator, the artist Jason Griffin, that takes in both the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests spurred by the murder of George Floyd.

Coelho, now based in Kent, studied for a degree in archaeology before taking on jobs as a gym instructor, a salesman and even as an extra in the teen spy film Agent Cody Banks 2. Always writing in his spare time, he started making money from poetry after taking a performance poetry course at Battersea Arts Centre, and spent many years running creative writing workshops in schools, writing plays and performing his poetry. His poems were published in print for the first time in his 2014 collection Werewolf Club Rules, which won the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education’s poetry award. He has since written more collections, as well as novels and picture books – including Our Tower, published earlier this year, which Guardian reviewer Imogen Russell Williams called a “glowing, poetic picture book” which “celebrates the joys of community in urban spaces while quietly affirming that the natural world belongs to everyone”.

Some of the issues the writers faced as children are still pressing today: according to a report by the National Literacy Trust earlier this year, almost one in five children in England between the ages of five and eight do not have a book of their own at home. And of course, even among the children who do have access to books, there are those who, like the young Reynolds, simply have no interest in reading.

The American writer is quick to note that “when we say we want our kids to read, the subtext is we want our kids to read novels ”. While he now loves novels, he found it hard to connect with them as a child, and knows that others like him may struggle too. “Is it more important that our young people have relationships with literature, or relationships with literacy?” has been the question he’s asked throughout his time as ambassador. “And if literacy is the answer, that means they should be able to read anything.”

Poetry was a gateway into literature for both Reynolds and Coelho, and both believe it can be a great starting point for today’s children, too. “Its economy is important for young people today, who have attention spans of a minute and a half,” Reynolds says. And it’s even better if children are encouraged to write their own poetry, Coelho says. “So many people feel left out, feel their voices aren’t valid, feel like they’ve got no options.” Encouraging children to write poetry about what interests them shows them that their voices matter, he says.

Introducing children to poetry shouldn’t always be done with a view to getting them to study it academically, Coelho adds. “I love analysing poetry, but it’s not for everyone.” And the authors agree that the definition of what counts as poetry needs widening. Reynolds remembers being asked once on a BBC radio show if he really believed that rap music was poetry. “And I was like, ‘Well, do you believe that Dylan is poetry? Is John Lennon a poet?’ ‘Of course,’ [the presenter] says. And I’m like, ‘Why is this a question?’”

Neither author has much time for such snobbish attitudes towards rap – but Coelho points out that it’s also frustrating when it’s assumed that he, a Black performance poet, must be a rapper. “I can’t rap. I’d love to be able to, but I can’t,” he says, a fact that is sometimes met with disappointment by teachers when he visits schools. “The suggestion that kids will only be interested in one particular type [of poetry], or that one is better than the other, is complete nonsense.” Give children variety, Coelho says, because then they can discover where their passions lie, and “it’s through passion that you get kids interested in reading”.

The worry that offering children and teenagers greater literary variety will erase the classics (as evidenced by the negative reaction to poems by Wilfred Owen and Philip Larkin being taken off the exam board OCR’s GCSE syllabus ) is an unfounded one, both Coelho and Reynolds firmly believe. Getting young people interested in contemporary writers actually “preserves the classics”, Reynolds says, “because you create readers”.

If children are only exposed to books they struggle to connect with, it could put them off reading altogether, he argues. “A 14-year-old who doesn’t want to read Keats today might read him at 25, because today they were reading Danez Smith .” Taking classics off syllabuses won’t make them disappear, he adds. “They’re not going away. The cream rises to the top: if they’re as good as everybody says, they’ll exist.”

Another controversial issue in the children’s book world, particularly in America, is the rising number of books being banned. A “rapid acceleration” of book censorship in US school districts was reported by PEN America earlier this year , with more than 2,500 different book bans having been implemented over the previous school year.

Reynolds’s own books have been among the most frequently banned titles, including All American Boys, a young adult novel the author co-wrote with Brendan Kiely about two boys facing racism and police brutality. The reasons given for its banning include the fact that it contains profanity and drug and alcohol use, as well as being thought by some to promote anti-police views.

The author is used to being unpopular with certain parents and teachers. “I’ve been banned for years. I’ve been banned ever since the beginning of my career,” he says. But the “very loud minority” fighting for these bans are far outweighed by those fighting against them, he says. “And I’m one of these sort of woowoo guys who does believe in some of the esotericism of art, that it will find its way, it will find who it’s for.”

Reynolds’s main worry is that censored books are removed from school libraries. “I have no qualms over you wanting to adjust your curriculum, I honestly don’t. It’s not my place … I’m just asking that you leave the books available, so that the young people who might want to read these books can get them.” That said, on a personal level, it still “hurts a lot” when his books are banned. “What it assumes, implicitly, is that I would do something to harm children,” he says. “I would never do such a thing, nor would any of my colleagues.”

Do they think it is ever acceptable to prevent children or teenagers from reading certain books, those that promote racist or prejudiced views, for example? Coelho is sceptical of directing children’s reading habits too much: “There’s so much baggage that comes with the ‘right’ things to be reading.” He thinks encouraging children towards “nourishing” books could be more effective than removing titles altogether. “I always see books as a kind of safe space where you can explore multiple ideas, get multiple viewpoints. I think that’s important,” he says.

Reynolds agrees – children can be exposed to many kinds of books “as long as there’s counterbalance”. He points out that many children are living in “dicey worlds” and can handle more than we give them credit for – he doesn’t “want young people to believe that the world exists without dissent”. So he’s comfortable with young people reading the titles he was assigned at school: books by Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Flannery O’Connor (“who says the N-word more than any writer, although she’s lauded as if she doesn’t.”)

“But also give [them] Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston and James Baldwin and Audre Lorde,” he says. Then students can see for themselves that “this person might be a bigot, but this story bucks the stereotype that this person is presenting”.

“That’s how you learn to think,” Coelho adds, but admits that “increasingly, I’m finding it a lot harder just to have a discussion and a debate”.

“It’s all: you’re either with me or against me, and that’s it. I don’t see how humanity can survive.” For this to change, conversations about different lives and views need to start early, and they need to start in the home, Reynolds believes. He is a strong advocate of starting a “book club in the house”, so that children and parents can “wrestle with complicated ideas together”.

Families reading together could also help to improve literacy in both children and adults, Coelho points out. Illiteracy can be a generational issue, and the poet attributes his own struggles with reading as a child to the fact that there wasn’t a culture of reading in his home. “Ironically, I found out as an adult, that my nan writes poems,” he says. “She’s a big reader, but she never read to her kids.”

The lack of literary role models in their own lives has obviously made both authors think carefully about the kind of figureheads they want to be. Coelho makes clear that he doesn’t just want to be an inspiration for Black children: “I think it’s important that [all young people] see authors of all races and ethnicities and backgrounds, because society is complex and mixed.”

“I don’t just want to read about people that have my life experience,” he adds. “Yeah, I want to read those books. But I also want to read about people that have totally different life experiences from me, as we all should, because we all become richer through that process.”

Reynolds agrees – to an extent. While he too believes that all young people should look to all kinds of role models, he points out: “For some of us, in order for us to see the world, we have to see ourselves first.”

“I represent all of the young people, but I definitely want to be a springboard for the ones that just haven’t felt safe in literature or in the world,” he adds, in what feels like an apt closing statement for his time as national ambassador. “So that they can then see that the world is broad and big and beautiful. And theirs.”

Joseph Coelho’s children’s books of the year

Fox & Son Tailers by Paddy Donnelly (O’Brien, age 2+) A beautiful book anchored in a simply brilliant idea … a world where animals have no tails: call in the Tailers! Genius.

The Girl Who Planted Trees by Caryl Hart and Anastasia Suvorova (Nosy Crow, age 2-5) An uplifting tale of how we can all make a difference to the damage done to the natural world. Incredibly empowering for young readers.

The Odd Fish by Naomi Jones and James Jones (Farshore, age 3-6) A sophisticated look at plastic pollution in a beautifully told and at times heartache-inducing story of one fish’s attempt to help “odd fish” find their family.

Courage in a Poem anthology (Caterpillar, age 5+) A stunning poetry anthology about courage, immigration, family and dedication, all gorgeously illustrated by Annalise Barber, Mariana Roldán, Masha Manapov and Nabila Adani.

Joyful Joyful , curated by Dapo Adeola, foreword by Patrice Lawrence (Two Hoots, age 8-11) A jubilant collection of short stories and poems celebrating Black voices, featuring Malorie Blackman, Sharna Jackson, Ken Wilson-Max and Dorcas Magbadelo.

Jason Reynolds’ children’s books of the year

Luli and the Language of Tea by Andrea Wang and illustrated by Hyewon Yum (Holiday House, age 3-7) A simple, profound story about how children already know many of our universal languages – in this case, it happens to be tea.

The First Cat in Space Ate Pizza by Mac Barnett and Shawn Harris (HarperCollins, age 8-12) A laugh-out-loud romp about … the first cat in space.

A Thousand Steps into Night by Traci Chee (HarperCollins, age 12+) Rich with magic and all the trappings of a good fantasy, this novel is less about the discovery of a world, and more about the discovery of the self.

All My Rage by Sabaa Tahir (Little, Brown, age 12+) A multi-generational story about what might lead to immigrating to the US, and the complicated nature of actually chasing the dream once you’ve arrived.

Break This House by Candice Iloh (Dutton, age 12-14) A tale of family fracture, forgiveness and discovering the truth about our perceived villains.

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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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Five Years Later: On the Enduring Legacy of All American Boys

And why its authors, jason reynolds and brendan kiely wish it would go out of print.

In the spring of 2016, students at Brooklyn Friends School blocked the school’s entryway. It was the middle of the day; any teachers who had left for lunch couldn’t return. That is, until they met the students’ demands to address the racism in the curriculum and the racist behavior of some staff members.

That’s when authors Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely arrived to give a presentation about their book All American Boys , which addresses police brutality, white privilege, and youth activism. The students were clear: Reynolds and Kiely were not coming in. They could leave, or they could stand with the protestors, but they were not giving their presentation that day.

Reynolds and Kiely locked arms with the students for hours.

“The wild thing is, this is the exact reason why everyone was afraid [for us] to come to their schools,” Reynolds says. “This is what they thought we were gonna do. It’s not us who did it. The kids were doing it.”

In September 2015, Reynolds and Kiely published All American Boys , which depicts a week in the lives of two kids from the same high school. As Rashad, a Black ROTC cadet and artist, decides what flavor chips to buy from the corner store, he’s beaten by a white police officer. Quinn, a white basketball player on his way to a party, witnesses the attack and realizes that the perpetrator is a local hero who has been his father figure after his own was killed in Afghanistan. As Rashad heals and contemplates what it means to be a rallying point, Quinn realizes his own white privilege and the flaws in his idol—and the system that keeps people like him in power. It went on to be a bestseller and win prizes including the inaugural Walter Dean Meyers Award. (In another life, I was lucky enough to be the publicist for this book. I no longer work in publicity, so I have no personal stake in whether people read it… but they should.)

Five years may not seem like a long time ago, but let’s remember: When this book was published, Obama would still be president for over a year. Racist showman Donald Trump had been an outsider presidential candidate for just three months. Calls for justice for Michael Brown and Eric Garner and Tamir Rice rang out through the streets, but the world did not yet know the names George Floyd or Breonna Taylor or Tony McDade or Philando Castille or Sandra Bland or or or. A protest depicted at the end of the book names Black people killed by police: Sean Bell, Rekia Boyd, Ramarley Graham… Reading it now, the list seems grimly incomplete.

For the better part of a year, Reynolds and Kiely traveled around the country, speaking to people who were relieved to see a book like this exist, and those who saw it as anticop propaganda. Both have published other books since (Reynolds is the current National Ambassador of Young People’s Literature), but at the time they were relatively new authors, shedding light on a continued national crisis that many Americans would rather ignore.

Now, while the US has a long-overdue reckoning with race, All American Boys remains as vital, if less controversial, than it was then. The kids who read it in high school are adults. The world has changed since it’s been published. And also, it hasn’t.

This book, its authors, and the conversations around it are a study in duality. A Black and a white character written by a Black and a white author. Paired narratives of racism and privilege, which Reynolds and Kiely, respectively, have experienced firsthand. The expectations of the book versus its reality—it is not anti-police, but anti-police brutality; it is not about Black death, it is about survival. The white and Black students they visited and rich and poor schools. The people saying yes, finally, and the people saying, no, never.

“Both stories in the book are about survival because the only way to talk about survival is for both of those stories to exist,” Kiely says. “For Quinn to sort of pull the wool off of his eyes and begin to see the actual reality, not the reality he wishes—that’s required for survival.”

Kiely and Reynolds became friends while on a group tour for their debut novels in 2014. The disparity between how the two moved through the country was stark.

Kiely noticed that in airports, Reynolds was searched and he was not. He saw the differing reactions of school security guards and teachers, when a Black man with tattoos and locs walked in, versus an Irish blond. After days of talking about books with teens, at night they had honest, sometimes tearful, sometimes angry conversations about race. “I remember in South Carolina saying brother, if I had to fight a man every time something racist happened? I’d be fighting every day, brother,” Reynolds says. “I don’t have time or energy. Brendan has the time and the energy to fight every single person.” He laughs.

Months later, in the wake of protests about the murders of Black men and boys by police, Kiely came to Reynolds with the idea for a book. “While we were having these conversations by being vulnerable, we were becoming better friends,” Kiely says. “And that all had to happen before we could write All American Boys, because we couldn’t sit down with some white dude’s intellectual plan to write a book about Black Lives Matter. That would be a complete failure.”

Their relationship was one of the most important parts of the writing process, and they insist there was never any tension between them—they almost wish there were; it would be a better story. Instead, they had to trust each other implicitly, and vowed to abandon the project if it could ruin the friendship.

For Reynolds, one other caveat of the book was that Rashad live, telling a common but often silent story. “I grew up with a bunch of people who experienced police brutality and did not die,” Reynolds said. “And it’s as if it never happened. And so when we talk about systemic racism and we talk about the sort of social psyche around police violence, what we’re truly talking about is the emotional trauma of millions of people who have bumped up against this, who live with it in their bodies. What about them?”

Reynolds is quick to clarify that this is a deeply personal feeling, not a criticism of books in which Black teens are killed, such as The Hate U Give or Dear Martin . “Every single story is a story that deserves to exist and needs to be a part of the pot so we get a full view of what exactly is happening,” he says.

Part of the full view in All American Boys is the nuanced portrayal of the cop, which Kiely says, “negate[s] the myth of the bad apple.” “I think it’s important for us to portray that, for white folks like me, many of our heroes, many of our family members, many of our basketball coaches, many of our teachers, many of our figureheads that we’ve looked up to… who are white have participated in a system that perpetuates violence against Black people and brown people and Indigenous people all the time,” Kiely says. “So it isn’t about villains, it’s about our collective accountability and culpability in that abuse.”

As they toured, they spoke to young people in schools, libraries, book festivals, and juvenile detention centers. In places with a majority Black population, they were welcomed with open arms. “There was an immediate reception from kids who were like, yes that’s real, yes that makes sense… you’re in the voice of my life and you’re telling the stories of our lives,” Kiely says.

“But it wasn’t that easy when it came to just getting the higher-ups and the gatekeepers on board with letting a book about police brutality into schools that weren’t Black,” Reynolds adds.

They also went to areas that had recently experienced police brutality incidents, like near Ferguson, MO. They went to places that weren’t welcoming. Places that we now refer to as Trump country. In places like that, people believed that the book was a form of anti-cop hate speech. Parents called school, kids opted out of presentations. Librarians had to fight to have the authors come. Sometimes, they were disinvited entirely. In one town, they spoke on the radio in the morning and by the time they arrived at the school a few hours later, parents had demanded the presentation be canceled. It wasn’t.

“The people who say you can’t talk about this book with our community because it’s too dangerous or radical or incendiary are people who perpetuate the very erasure of the kids who were saying, this is my reality,” Kiely says. “I think that it’s really important to reiterate that this kind of fear from particularly white people but figures of authority across the country about talking about reality is part of the perpetuation of oppressing the very folks whose survival we’re trying to talk about in the book.”

Danger. It’s another duality. As white gatekeepers feared that a work of young adult fiction would challenge their kids, Black communities fear the daily violence that appears in the book.

In many schools, Reynolds and Kiely had to engage with police directly—officers who had read the book and ones who hadn’t, cops who hated them and ones who were proud of them. Just as they are accountable to each other, they believe in accountability in police forces, for good cops to report bad cops.

“But—or and rather, as Brendan has taught me over the years— and having traveled this country and having seen the nooks and the crannies and the corners, quitting a job isn’t always so easy. Being able to say, I can’t do this job because of my racist coworkers who are doing terrible things, I’m going to quit this job, isn’t always as easy as us city folk like to believe,” Reynolds says. In rural Louisiana or Maryland, for example, these may be the highest paying jobs.

“It doesn’t mean that we should excuse it, but I’m saying that Brendan and I were fortunate to see a lot of the country with our own eyes and recognize some of the class issues at play in the midst of all of the other things,” he says.

Like the friendship-forging conversations they had with each other, they had emotional discussions about race and policing with the officers themselves, hugging it out afterward. Sometimes, Kiely would go into the bathroom and cry.

“Those are important moments because those are people who have the courage to grapple with the complexity that Jason’s talking about,” he says. “All the personal complexity, but also to understand their personal context in the macro. And if young kids are doing that all the time, all over this country, as complicated as it is, I think it’s worth our challenging the adults in these communities to grapple with these complexities too.”

With the benefit of these five years of hindsight, which encompassed the Women’s March and the #MeToo movement, if they had it to write over, Kiely and Reynolds would change one major thing about the book: increased page time for female characters. “It is called All American Boys, but there’s some problem with that,” Kiely says. “Jason and I have talked about this a thousand times. We would definitely do a better job including a much more prominent role for the young women in the book.”

Five years ago, it was courageous to publish this book within an extremely white publishing industry. As the business diversifies at a glacial pace from the bottom up, in many ways it still is.

“From a very basic human level, if a white man is at the top writing checks for the things that he believes in, the things that he believes make money or the things that he could invest in safely for himself—self-interest is always important to discuss—why wouldn’t he dump money into white men?” Reynolds says. “Is it racist? Of course it’s racist! But the racism of it has more to do with the fact that he can’t acknowledge the bias and won’t do anything to put people next to him who have their own taste to diversify that industry and that money.”

There is hope: in the weeks after this interview, two Black women were named as publishers at major houses.

In 2015, Kiely says, there was a sense of urgency to write a book about what was going on in the country. Though he’s written other novels, All American Boys is still the focus of most of his presentations. “It feels kind of weird I think to feel like we’re still in the moment in many ways that we were in six years ago when we sat down to write the book,” he says.

“It would be dope if, like, for the ten-year anniversary the book goes out of print,” Reynolds says. “Like it’s just not necessary anymore. It’s like historical fiction, you know. That would be awesome.”

“If it could go in a museum,” Kiely says.

“I wish it didn’t have to exist, but I do think about Toni Morrison and I think about James Baldwin and I think about all the writers who understood that you have an obligation to some extent to document the time and to make art that’s going to challenge the society and challenge the quo. To really push people to think about the world in a way maybe they haven’t, or to push people to push back against themselves and their own sort of comforts that they’ve settled into, that happen to also be poisoning the people around them,” Reynolds says. “And if we did that, even if only for a single generation, shit man, I don’t know. You know what I mean? What else is there?”

Katy Hershberger

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