Jason Reynolds is a bestseller author and poet of books for young adults. He is the winner of many prestigious awards, including the Kirkus Prize, the Walter Dean Myers Award that honors excellent portrayals of diversity in children’s literature, and an NAACP Image Award. His most famous books are Ghost, which was a finalist for a 2016 National Book Award and the first in Reynolds’s Track series, When I Was the Greatest, The Boy in the Black Suit, Look Both Ways, and Long Way Down, which won a Newbery Honor from the Association for Library Service to Children and a Printz Honor from the American Library Association. He also wrote a graphic novel for Marvel Comics called Miles Morales: Spider-Man.

Reynolds credits Black rappers including Queen Latifah, Tupac Shakur, and Biggie Smalls with his earliest inspiration to write. Mainstream literature did not often address the experiences of Black youth and teenagers. His work addresses that historical void.

Dr. Ibram X. Kendi is a leading author, historian, and speaker on Black history, discriminatory policy, racism, and antiracism. His 2016 historical study, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and provides the basis for Stamped, its young adult “remix.