Oh man!
Last night I got to hear Jason Reynolds speak.
He was the closing speaker at the Oregon Association of School Libraries conference.
Once, I was a member of OASL and even served on the conference committee. This time, I just showed up for the culminating event.
Though he said he wasn’t feeling well and he clearly sounded congested, Jason Reynolds spoke powerfully. He made us laugh and cry.
He is a storyteller and he told us his story. What he did right and, perhaps more significantly, what he did wrong.
He told us how Queen Latifah inspired him and how he learned to write poetry. At times. he spoke directly to the kids in the audience about writing past the people tells them they aren’t (good enough, white enough) or that are wrong with them (their accent, their clothes) and just be them,tell their own stories.
Because it was an encounter with Christopher Myers, author, illustrator and son of Walter Dean Myers, that helped Jason Reynolds. Meyers told him he needed to tell his own stories to put his tongue to paper.
On October 24th, Jason Reynolds’ newest book Long Way Down, a novel in verse, comes out. I already have a hold on a library copy.
Publisher’s Summary: An ode to Put the Damn Guns Down, this is National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestseller Jason Reynolds’s fiercely stunning novel that takes place in sixty potent seconds—the time it takes a kid to decide whether or not he’s going to murder the guy who killed his brother.
A cannon. A strap.
A piece. A biscuit.
A burner. A heater.
A chopper. A gat.
A hammer
A tool
for RULE
Or, you can call it a gun. That’s what fifteen-year-old Will has shoved in the back waistband of his jeans. See, his brother Shawn was just murdered. And Will knows the rules. No crying. No snitching. Revenge. That’s where Will’s now heading, with that gun shoved in the back waistband of his jeans, the gun that was his brother’s gun. He gets on the elevator, seventh floor, stoked. He knows who he’s after. Or does he? As the elevator stops on the sixth floor, on comes Buck. Buck, Will finds out, is who gave Shawn the gun before Will took the gun. Buck tells Will to check that the gun is even loaded. And that’s when Will sees that one bullet is missing. And the only one who could have fired Shawn’s gun was Shawn. Huh. Will didn’t know that Shawn had ever actually USED his gun. Bigger huh. BUCK IS DEAD. But Buck’s in the elevator? Just as Will’s trying to think this through, the door to the next floor opens. A teenage girl gets on, waves away the smoke from Dead Buck’s cigarette. Will doesn’t know her, but she knew him. Knew. When they were eight. And stray bullets had cut through the playground, and Will had tried to cover her, but she was hit anyway, and so what she wants to know, on that fifth floor elevator stop, is, what if Will, Will with the gun shoved in the back waistband of his jeans, MISSES.
And so it goes, the whole long way down, as the elevator stops on each floor, and at each stop someone connected to his brother gets on to give Will a piece to a bigger story than the one he thinks he knows. A story that might never know an END…if WILL gets off that elevator.
Told in short, fierce staccato narrative verse, Long Way Down is a fast and furious, dazzlingly brilliant look at teenage gun violence, as could only be told by Jason Reynolds.
We are all excited to enjoy the work and words of Kadir Nelson, most recently author-illustrator of the children’s biography Nelson Mandela, as well as Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans, and the award-winning We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball. In addition, his gorgeous oil paintings have illuminated other authors’ work, including Martin Luther King, Jr.’s illustrated I Have A Dream, Matt de la Pena’s A Nation’s Hope: The Story of Boxing Legend Joe Louis, and Carol Boston Weatherford’s Moses and Ellen Levine’s Henry’s Freedom Box for which he won a Caldecott Honor Medal. Nelson has garnered both the Coretta Scott King Illustrator and Author awards, a Sibert medal, the NAACP Image Award, the CASEY award for best baseball book, as well as having his fine art collected by major public and private institutions worldwide.
booksandbassets 