Jason Reynolds: Hi, everybody. This is Jason Reynolds, the author of Long Way Down. I'm going to tell you a bit about how I came to write this book and then I'll share a short excerpt with you. Long Way Down is interesting. I've been trying to figure out how to write a novel in verse or if I wanted to write a novel in verse. This story had been sort of knocking around my head for a while. I, unfortunately, was a young person who experienced the loss of a dear friend, a loss of many friends, but the loss of one dear friend to gun violence. I wanted to write a book to talk about not just gun violence, and not just the problem with it, but more so about how human it is to be angry as a child, and how we don't want to discuss that pain and the trauma, especially when it comes to loss. I've been in the situation as the young man in this book, and I wanted to honor all the kids out there who have felt such a burden and such a strange, strange, strange pain.

Now, I'm going to read an excerpt from the book.

I don't know you, don't know your last name, or if you've got brothers or sisters, or mothers or fathers, or cousins that be like brothers and sisters, or aunties or uncles that be like mothers and fathers, but if the blood inside you is on the inside of someone else, you never want to see it on the outside of them. The sadness is just so hard to explain.

Imagine waking up and someone, a stranger, got you strapped down got pliers shoved into your mouth gripping your tooth somewhere in the back, one of the big important ones, and rips it out. Imagine the knocking in your head, the pressure pushing through your ears, the blood pooling. But the worst part, the absolute worst part is the constant slipping of your tongue into the new empty space where you know a tooth supposed to be but ain't no more.

It's so hard to say Sean's dead. Sean's dead. Sean's dead. It's so strange to say, so sad, but I guess not surprising, which I guess is even stranger and even sadder. The day before yesterday, me and my friend Tony were outside talking about whether or not we'd get any taller now that we're 15. When Sean was 15, he grew a foot, maybe a foot and a half. That's when he gave me all the clothes he couldn't fit. Tony kept saying he hoped he'd grew because even though he was the best ballplayer around here our age, he was also the shortest. Everybody know you can't go all the way when you're that small unless you can really jump like fly.

And then, there were shots. Everybody ran, duck, hid, tucked themselves tight. Did what we've all been trained to do. Pressed our lips to the pavement and prayed the boom followed by the buzz of a bullet ain't meet us. And after the shots, me and Tony waited like we always do for the rumble to stop before picking our heads up and poking our heads out to count the bodies. This time, there was only one shot.