“I was like, ‘This is where I’m supposed to be.’” “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. “They are catching up with the idea that there are new voices to be heard.”Īt 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. “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. 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. 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. When Reynolds hesitated, Myers recommended he read a book by his father, the children’s book author Walter Dean Myers, for inspiration.

One day, his friend Christopher Myers visited him at the Rag & Bone store he was managing and encouraged him to start writing again. Reynolds settled into a career in retail, and tried three times to get into M.F.A. 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. 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’s limousine and you throw it in the car.” For him, the demo was a book he and his college roommate had self-published. Reynolds, who grew up in Oxon Hill, Md., just outside Washington, credits his success to “sheer hustling.” It didn’t happen right away.

Long way down by jason reynolds