Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi

Jason Reynolds was born in Washington, D.C. and raised in a nearby suburb. He was passionate about poetry and rap at a young age, but he didn’t read a single novel until he discovered Richard Wright’s Black Boy at the age of 17. Then, he started working his way through classic Black American novels. At the University of Maryland, he studied English literature, worked at a bookstore focused on Black literature, and started performing spoken word. He began publishing his poetry after graduation but mainly supported himself by working retail. He had his first big break in 2015 with All American Boys, a young adult novel he co-authored with Brendan Kiely. Ever since, he has published numerous acclaimed young adult novels, most of which focus on Black teenagers growing up in the U.S. in the 21st century. Ibram X. Kendi was born and raised in Queens, New York. After finishing high school in Virginia, he studied African American studies and magazine production at Florida A&M University. In 2010, he earned a PhD in African American Studies at Temple University, where he wrote a dissertation on Black student activism in the 1960s. He has taught at various universities around the United States, including the State University of New York (Oneonta and Albany), Brown University, the University of Florida, and American University. As of 2021, he is a history professor at Boston University, where he also directs the Center for Antiracist Research and founded the racial justice newspaper The Emancipator. He won the National Book Award for Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, and his How to Be an Antiracist was a number-one New York Times Best Seller in 2020.