Jason Reynolds

Reynolds grew up in Oxon Hill, Maryland, an unincorporated suburb of Washington, D.C. While a young student, Reynolds grew frustrated by what his teachers assigned him to read—he found that he couldn’t identify with the characters or get interested in books about subjects that seemed to have little to do with his lived experience. Because of this, he didn’t read a novel until he was 17. Two things began to turn Reynolds onto literature and poetry: rap music in the form of Queen Latifah’s album Black Rain as a young kid, and reading Richard Wright’s novel Black Boy as an older teen. Inspired by Queen Latifah, he wrote poetry all through his teen years and through college, even as he failed English classes. His first novel, co-written with Jason Griffin, was a critical and financial failure, so Reynolds took a job managing a Rag and Bone clothing store and contemplated giving up on writing. A friend, however, encouraged Reynolds to write in his own voice. The result was When I Was the Greatest. Since then, Reynolds has written several other young adult novels, mostly about young Black characters living in neighborhoods that resemble the one where he grew up. His goal is to help improve literacy rates and, specifically, to try to convert “book-haters” by writing books that he would’ve been interested in as a young person. Since 2020, Reynolds has been the Library of Congress’s national ambassador for young people’s literature. His books have won the Coretta Scott King award, the Carnegie Medal (which Look Both Ways won in 2021), and have been named finalists for the National Book Awards.