Jason Reynolds: Hello. My name is Jason Reynolds, and I am the author of The Boy in the Black Suit, and I want to tell you a little bit about the book today. The Boy in the Black Suit, in a nutshell, is about a young man named Matt Miller who loses his mother to breast cancer, and to mourn the death and to grieve the death of his mom, he starts crashing funerals, sort of like how there's a party crasher or a wedding crasher. He starts crashing funerals, which means he just starts to show up and participate in the funerals of strangers in hopes that he may find a bit of solace there.

The reason I wrote it, which I think is most interesting, is because I was a young person who experienced a lot of death really early in life, unfortunately. Between the ages of 10 and 18, I buried a lot of people, and I went to a ton of funerals of family members, of community members, of friends in school with me, and no one was there to tell me how to deal with the grief, and no one was there to help me mourn the loss of all these people. Everyone just said, "Everything will be okay."

The truth is that things weren't okay, not for me, not for a long time, and so I wanted to write a book that showed a young man just dealing with his feelings and his emotions, to hopefully carve out a safe space for all the young readers out there, to know that sometimes it's okay to feel pain, it's okay to be sad, and that you don't have to get over it. That's in your own time. That's up to you, as the process is all ours, and that when you decide to be happy again, when you decide to find joy again, you'll make that decision on your own, and that the adults around you, their job is just to make sure that you're safe and that you have a space to grieve and mourn in peace. That's it, and that you can rely on your friends to bring some joy back to your life, too, with the character of Lovie.