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Jason Reynolds was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Oxon Hill, Maryland. He wasn’t into reading or writing as a boy, but that changed when he discovered his love for the lyrics and flow of Hip Hop. “It was through rap music and the discovery of rap lyrics that I found my path and my way into the world of poetry,” he said in the Kennedy Center interview. “And that poetry evolved over the course of ten, fifteen years into a way for me to tell my own stories.”

Like the main character in his book Long Way Down, Reynolds says he and his friends faced an important decision. “When I was 19, a friend of mine was murdered,” Reynolds said in a recent interview with The Guardian. “That night my friends and I went to his mom’s house and we were all planning to figure out who did this to him so we could exact revenge. So we could murder the man who murdered our friend. And I just remember the pain – the pain of the lost friend but also the pain of meeting a part of myself that I didn’t know existed. A part of myself that could lose control to the point where I could commit a murder. That’s a very human thing.” The mother of the dead friend talked Reynolds and his friends out of retaliating, saying no other mother should ever have to feel like she did at that moment.

Reynolds is now an award-winning, internationally-celebrated author of young adult books. Titles include When I Was the Greatest, Ghost, The Boy in the Black Suit, and As Brave as You. He has also written the Marvel Comics novel Miles Morales: Spider-Man and co-authored All American Boys with Brendan Kiely.

Below, watch a 2018 interview with Reynolds captured during the Kennedy Center's stage adaptation premiere of Long Way Down.

Author Jason Reynolds explains that Long Way Down was originally written in prose, but he eventually shifted the novel to free verse. Free verse is a poetic form, but one without rigid rhymes, rhythm, or structure; it may play with words up and down and across the page. It is effective for streamlining language and condensing emotion in powerful ways. In Long Way Down, he used free verse to create a sense of urgency, discomfort, and disorientation. Reynolds felt his “60-second story” would be more believable if written in poetry than in prose. “When experiencing trauma, the brain is not working in complete sentences,” he says. “I wanted to put the brain on the page.”

Long Way Down was adapted into a play from the free-verse novel by Jason Reynolds. It takes place in an unnamed neighborhood of an unnamed city where many members are confronting loss.

The book and play are about a boy facing extraordinary circumstances, Reynolds says. In an interview with the Kennedy Center, he described the character’s dilemma this way: “Will has to make a really difficult decision because he comes from a community…where there are codes; there are rules and ecosystems that must be followed. And so he has to figure out and to choose whether or not he’s going to follow the rules [of his community], and one of those rules is, unfortunately, to avenge his brother’s death.”

The play follows Will’s experience as he struggles with this choice. Will he follow those rules that have been handed down to him? Or make new ones for himself? Reynolds emphasizes such codes of behavior exist in every community—well-off or under-resourced, from cities to suburbs to small towns.

So how does Will’s decision-making play out in Long Way Down? The book and the play intentionally leave Will’s final decision unstated and does not herd the audience toward any one conclusion about what he should or shouldn’t do. Instead, it challenges us to sort through and connect the perspectives, the feelings, and circumstances to present an open-ended question for us to weigh: After all his experiences on the long way down, what choice will this teenage boy make?

Here’s an example from the book, using both the freedom of free verse and shape poetry to signal a key moment.

AT THE ELEVATOR

Back already sore.
Uncomfortable.
Gun strapped
like a brick
rubbing my skin
raw with each step.

See like time
stood still as I
reached out and
pushed the button.

White light
surrounded the
black arrow.

DOWN

DOWN

DOWN DOWN DOWN

DOWN DOWN

DOWN

Inspiring young people to write, as well as read, is part of Jason Reynolds’s life mission. He urges everyone to express their lives in words and art, whatever form that takes—prose, poetry, song lyrics, comics, anything at all. “The greatest gift [young writers] have is the voice that feels most natural,” he says. Not sure how to start? Watch for striking images and listen for powerful phrases from your own life and experience, then write them down. Here are some other ideas to help you practice capturing your own life in words:

Anagrams are word puzzles. They involve rearranging letters of a word or phrase to create a new word or words, with all the letters being used once. Anagrams appear in the play, such as in one instance when Will rearranges the letters for "ocean" to create "canoe." Will's anagrams offer clues about his thoughts and the action in the play.

Here are a few words for you and your friends to anagram:

listen
drawer
past
rules
friend
discern
verse
assume

(Answers: listen: enlist, silent, tinsel; drawer: reward, redraw, warder, warred; past: spat, taps, pats; rules: lures; friend: finder; discern: rescind, cinders; verse: serve, sever, veers; assume: amuses)

What other words can you think of that are anagrams? Also, think about how the different words of an anagram may be related in interesting ways. For example, Will makes the connection between “ocean” and its anagram “canoe.”

Claiming Personal Power

Ideas and resources to help when you want to add your personal power to the company of others.

Get Your Write On

A handful of online resources to link you up with others working on their writing.

Dealing with Trauma

Some resources to help with dealing with traumatic stress.

Free verse can be a graceful way to capture experience in tight, meaning-packed language. It often emphasizes the senses to connect quickly and intensely with readers. Consider the following phrases and similes from the Long Way Down (page numbers in parentheses):

a headlock
that felt like a hug (p. 45)

the pistol under my pillow
like a lost tooth (p. 60)

the stench of
death and sweat
trapped in the
cotton like
fish grease (p. 65)

A jagged mouth,
sharp and sharklike (p. 79)

the cigarette dangling,
bouncing with each word
like a fishing pole
with fish on bait,
with hook through head (p. 132)

Sadness
split his face
like cold breeze
on chapped lip
after attempting
to smile (p. 165)

Use sensory detail along with your memory and imagination to write two or more moments like these. There is no right or wrong, good or bad; there is just what you feel and know. If it helps, think about what stories are important to you—about aspects of your life, the people you know, and the community and world around you. Imagine how to describe snapshots of those things and ideas, then write!

Jason Reynolds says we are all “haunted by something.” He means there are experiences in our lives that we can’t seem to leave behind—a death, a lost love, a memory of perfect happiness. These moments trigger deep feelings—sometimes of comfort, sometimes of heartache. Write a story or narrative about what haunts you or someone you have known. You might even borrow from Long Way Down and envision an encounter or conversation with others who can share other perspectives on whatever or whomever is doing the haunting. Inject sensory detail to help your writing come alive.

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