American - Author | December 6, 1983 -
Rap music was and is, for me, everything.
Jason Reynolds
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I wanted to be a poet. I fell in love with poetry around eight years old, but not through literature. Instead, it came through hip-hop lyrics and my obsession with reading liner notes. Queen Latifah's 'Black Reign' is the album that stands out the most.
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I read 'The Young Landlords' and felt almost a chemical change. What I realized while reading that book was that I could write in my voice, use my tongue, my language, my style, and write a story.
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I write about six to seven hours a day, five days a week, unless I'm traveling.
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'To Kill a Mockingbird' wasn't about me.
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Queen Latifah was writing poetry. Maybe Latifah's 'Ladies First' and Angelou's 'Phenomenal Woman' are the same thing, a generation apart.
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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.
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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.
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I grew up around a whole bunch of girls, and one thing I realized is what they had on their plate was very different than what I had on mine. The things girls are made to be responsible for is a heavy burden - take care of your younger siblings, do good in school, have some extracurriculars. The pressure is intense.
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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.
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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.
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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?'
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