“They’ve been hearing that all day, all year,” he said. Instead he talks about ramen noodles, Jordan 11s, the rapper DaBaby, “whatever it takes to get them engaged.”
Earlier this month, when Reynolds’ “Long Way Down” was selected as Baltimore’s “One Book Baltimore” pick, he came to the city to field questions about the book and sign copies for hundreds of middle school students. They listened to him as he compared hip-hop to poetry — “There’s a direct connection between Tupac and Langston Hughes” — and said that early rappers should’ve been considered “teenage geniuses.”
These events — he’s done about 50 this year — are a driving part of his work as a writer: to make black children and teenagers feel seen in real life as well as on the page. “I can talk directly to them in a way that I know they’re going to relate to because I am them,” Reynolds said, “and I still feel like them.”
If his book sales and literary accolades are any indication, his approach is working. Reynolds, 35, is a finalist for the National Book Award in young people’s literature for “Look Both Ways,” which came out this month. (It is his second time as a finalist, having made the list in 2016 for his book “Ghost.”) “Look Both Ways” is his 13th book, with a 14th, an adaptation of Ibram X. Kendi’s “Stamped From the Beginning,” scheduled for release next year. His 2017 book “Long Way Down” was named a Newbery Honor Book by the American Library Association, as well as a Michael L. Printz Honor Book, the organization’s award for young adult literature. His books have sold more than 2.5 million copies.
“Look Both Ways” unfolds across 10 city blocks, delving into the lives of middle schoolers on their way home from school in the afternoons. It is a time when they are unsupervised, Reynolds said, and they “get to learn about the world on their own, for better or for worse.”
Writing for black children first and foremost, Reynolds attempts to portray the scope of their lives — sometimes including guns and violence but also happiness and laughter. “There’s always a joke somewhere,” he said. “You don’t go through what black and brown people have been through in this country and survive without understanding how to tap into joy.”
And he often portrays boys crying or feeling uncertainty or fear, because, he said, “I need boys to know that it’s OK.”
Reynolds, who grew up in Oxon Hill, Maryland, just outside Washington, credits his success to “sheer hustling.” It didn’t happen right away. He described his first attempts at getting published as straight out of a rapper’s playbook: cut a demo, then “run into a record company or you find Russell Simmons’ limousine and you throw it in the car.” For him, the demo was a book he and his college roommate had self-published. After graduating from the University of Maryland in 2005, they moved to New York and tried to slip it to security guards at publishing houses, hoping it would wind up in an editor’s hands.
The method didn’t work. Reynolds settled into a career in retail, and tried three times to get into MFA programs but was rejected. One day, his friend Christopher Myers visited him at the Rag & Bone store he was managing and encouraged him to start writing again. When Reynolds hesitated, Myers recommended he read a book by his father, children’s book author Walter Dean Myers, for inspiration.
Reynolds, who was not a reader growing up, in 2011 picked up “The Young Landlords,” about six teenagers tricked into taking on a rundown Harlem building. “It chemically changed me,” Reynolds said, because it gave him permission to draw from the stories of his friends and family and write the way they speak.
Soon after, he opened a notebook and started writing what would become his first solo book, “When I Was the Greatest,” published in 2014, about three black teenage boys growing up in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood.
Reynolds released his next books in rapid succession: “The Boy in the Black Suit” (2015), about grief and loss; “All American Boys” (2015), written with Brendan Kiely, about two teenagers of different races reckoning with police brutality; “As Brave as You” (2016), based on his brother and blind grandfather; “Ghost,” (2016), based on the life of his friend Matthew Carter. Each book did better than the last, buoyed in part by a market for children’s literature that was increasingly vocal about its lack of diversity.
“The publishing world has caught up with him," said Christopher Myers, who started Make Me a World, a diversity-focused imprint at Penguin Random House. “They are catching up with the idea that there are new voices to be heard.”
At the same time, Reynolds was doing dozens of events per year, at schools, conferences and prisons, finding that the interactions with the young people reading his books was energizing for him. “It was like, ‘Oh, so I get to rock with the kids? I get to rock with the teenagers? I get to have these conversations with them?’” he said. “I was like, ‘This is where I’m supposed to be.’”
Asked why she feels young people are drawn to Reynolds, writer Jacqueline Woodson said: “Have you seen him?”
“Kids have not been exposed to a writer who looks like he does, who sounds like he does, who has that deep honesty and connection with them like he does,” she said. “He really sees these kids.”
Sidney Thomas, a teacher who attended the event in Baltimore, said her students responded to “Long Way Down,” a novel in verse about a boy contemplating revenge after his brother is fatally shot, because many have experienced similar losses. “I think they have a connection to it, and I think it feels very real,” she said.
One such student, an eighth-grader who lost her sister and other relatives to gun violence, said the book “brings back memories about losing my family, but it helps me.”
She added: “If more people would focus on these topics, then less people would be gunned down.”
Reynolds worries sometimes that his books might be read as “trauma porn” by people who didn’t grow up where he did, where “your neighbor could be a schoolteacher, federal government workers, but then you also had dope boys.” But, he added, referring to “Long Way Down,” “my shorties, my kids, my family, they read it, and they know exactly what this book is about.”
His own emotional growth was nurtured by his mother and a group of childhood friends with whom he’d run around town. They went to each other’s football games and Reynolds’ poetry slams, or took joy rides in his mother’s Mazda. “We were just kids. We were playing around,” Reynolds said. “It just so happens that some of us died, and some of us got caught up.”
For him, though, it was his friends who kept him out of trouble and allowed him to be his full self, he said. “I could always say to them, ‘It hurts. It hurts,’ and they could hold that.”
Myers, who has known Reynolds since his early days in New York City, has observed Reynolds’ work “changing, moving, growing with him,” and Reynolds’ editor, Caitlyn Dlouhy, agreed. “He never wants to do what he’s done before,” she said. “He is always pushing his own abilities to play within the different formats, to give kids other ways to have a reading experience.”
Reynolds said he might write for adults one day, but he’ll never stop writing for young people. “I just think it's a wonderful experience to sit down at the page with such intention,” he said.
One student in Baltimore asked the author whether the street rules in “Long Way Down” — no crying, no snitching, get revenge — were ones kids like her should be following.
“It’s complicated,” Reynolds said. He explained that he doesn’t advocate violence, but he understands the “pain and the anger” underpinning the desire for revenge.
“I think your generation has to start grappling with whether or not those rules work for you in your time,” he told the middle schoolers. “My job,” he said, “is to say, ‘I understand. I see you.’ ”
This article originally appeared in
.