JASON REYNOLDS

Poetry has the ability to create entire moments with just a few choice words. The spacing and line breaks create rhythm, a helpful musicality, a natural flow. The separate stanzas aid in perpetuating a kind of incremental reading, one small chunk at a time.

I love, loved, loved 'We Real Cool' by Gwendolyn Brooks.

People always say time heals. Time doesn't necessarily heal anything. It allows you to manage things. There are occasions where you feel the pain as if it just happened, but you know that it's a fleeting moment.

It's naive of adults to believe that young people aren't aware of what is going on in the world. The best thing we can do is confront that to help them navigate it. We can help them say, 'These things are happening. What does that mean for your life?'

The stories of kids who grew up in communities like mine weren't being written about in many books for kids.

The idea of the mask in any scenario has always fascinated me. Not only does it protect identity, it also allows one to hide.

The truths are universal: Every kid knows fear. Every kid knows family and friendship. Loss, love, laughter. Everything else is just detail.

All I want kids to know is that I see them for who they are and not who everyone thinks they are.

I try to be an active griever. I feel like we lean on time because of the trope 'Time heals all wounds.' And there is truth to that, but I don't think that it's absolute. I think that to grieve and to deal and cope, you have to be actively processing the information. Have your moments, be broken, and allow yourself to fully express pain.

Grief is like mending a knee. You can mend the knee and make it function, but the knee never actually heals.

I was eight years old when I got the talk about what to do if a police officer stops me. I was 15 when I was face-down on the curb for the first time.

Rappers are the white authors of our generation. They know me, my language, my codes, my family, my block.

Hip-hop saved me. It gave me permission to use language in a certain way. It validated my community and my friends. It gave our slang a certain elegance.

'To Kill a Mockingbird' wasn't about me.

I write about six to seven hours a day, five days a week, unless I'm traveling.

All the academy will tell you that the language that is familiar to you is not appropriate. and that's not to say that there shouldn't be a standard, but when I come to school with my friends' language, my grandmother's language, the language in my mouth - you're going to tell me that's improper?

I would go to the store, I would buy cassette tapes, and I would read the liner notes and sort of subconsciously creating the connections between the rappers that I was reading and the poets that they were teaching us in school.

I believe that every character is a setting, a world with moving parts, and on the other hand, every setting is, in fact, a character - a living breathing thing with personality and backstory. The way stories come to life, at least for me, is when these elements commune in relationship to one another.

I am a consummate metaphor addict.

If a kid is reading a book about someone who looks like them but doesn't talk like them, we stunt their growth by dissing them.

The feeling of self-discovery, for me, is perennial.

It wasn't that the teachers were bad. From what I can remember, they were pretty good. It was about the selection of books. It was about not seeing my young life reflected back to me: my family dynamics, the noise and complexities of my neighborhood, the things I loved, like ice cream trucks and Kool-Aid.

We've always been told to pretend as if we're not afraid.

Writing is like any other sort of sport. In order for you to get better at it, you have to exercise the muscle.

I have a hard time with people who say they write for children but they don't really like children. I love children. I love talking with them.