Author Jason Reynolds discusses what led to his new YA novel ‘Long Way Down’

Jason Reynolds can empathize with kids who don’t like to read: He was 17 before he read a book cover to cover. It’s a fact he’s shared with thousands of kids in classrooms and auditoriums across the country, as a cautionary tale.

“It’s not something I’m proud of. It’s not cool,” he recently told a group of seventh-graders in Stafford, Virginia. “The truth is, my life was made infinitely more difficult because I didn’t read any books.”

Reynolds has just published his ninth book, a novel in verse called “Long Way Down” (Atheneum, 306 pp., $17.99), about a young man coping with the shooting death of his brother. It was longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. At 33, Reynolds is a bestselling author with an array of awards, including multiple Coretta Scott King Book Award honors and an NAACP Image Award. He’s been a National Book Award finalist, shared stages with Ta-Nehisi Coates and Rep. John Lewis and appeared in the pages of People magazine.

The tale of Reynolds’ transformation from a nonreader living on the edge in Oxon Hill, Maryland, to a literary celebrity is the kind of relatable story he wished he’d read when he was a kid.

“It’s hard to be what you can’t see,” he said in an interview in Washington, D.C., where he lives part-time.

When he was in school, teachers gave him the classics — Shakespeare, “Moby-Dick,” “Lord of the Flies.” They didn’t click with him. As he explained to his middle-school audience, “I’m like, bruh . . . I don’t know if I can connect to a man chasing a whale when I’ve never seen a whale,” he said. “Nothing that’s happening in these books is happening in my neighborhood.”

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Reynolds writes books about what is happening in his neighborhood. “Ghost” tells the story of a boy who joins a track team as an escape from the violence in his past. “The Boy in the Black Suit” is about a city kid grieving the death of his mother. “When I Was the Greatest” has a group of friends navigating the streets of nongentrified Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn. The voices are those Reynolds heard around him in the 1980s and ’90s, in a neighborhood where drugs and violence were on his doorstep, but inside was a loving family — aunties and close friends, one of whom taught Reynolds how to crochet (which he still does).

The first book he read, just before he turned 18, was Richard Wright’s “Black Boy.” “The mischief in that book,” he says, “reminded me of the mischief that my friends and I had done.” Reynolds delved into the works of Toni Morrison and other African-American authors.

As a student at the University of Maryland, he and his best friend collaborated on a collection of poetry and art. They went into debt printing it and, after graduation, brought it to New York, expecting to get a deal. What they got was an agent, and an editor who encouraged them to write books for reluctant young readers. It was a demographic Reynolds knew well.

The result was “My Name Is Jason. Mine Too” (2009). It was not exactly a commercial success. A broke and disheartened Reynolds returned to the D.C. area, put aside his literary dream and went to work for his father, the director of a mental health clinic.

After a year, Reynolds returned to New York but not to be a writer. He became the manager of a Rag & Bone clothing store in Manhattan. And he’d still be there, he says, were it not for the intervention of an old friend, writer Christopher Myers.

Myers encouraged Reynolds to write in his own voice and to tell stories about “the neighborhood kids, the black and brown kids who need to know that they exist, that they are special and valuable.” So that’s what Reynolds did, often while standing at the cash register when business was slow. “When I Was the Greatest” came out in 2014. The book was a critical success and gave Reynolds the confidence to embrace his identity as a writer.

“All I want kids to know is that I see them for who they are and not who everyone thinks they are,” he says. He is committed, he says, to getting their stories right — “and putting that on the page with integrity and balance, to acknowledge the glory and the brokenness. That’s all I want to do. It’s a lot, but so are they.”