When Reynolds was 19, one of his best friends was murdered on the street. Long Way Down was inspired by Reynolds’s experiences working with incarcerated youth, whose fates, he acknowledges, could’ve easily been his own. His goal is to help improve literacy rates, and specifically, to help convert “book-haters” by writing books that he would’ve been interested in as a young person. Since then, Reynolds has written several other young adult novels, mostly about young black characters living in neighborhoods that resemble the one where he grew up. A friend, however, encouraged Reynolds to write in his own voice. His first novel, co-written with Jason Griffin, was a critical and financial failure, so Reynolds took a job managing a Rag and Bone clothing store and contemplated giving up on writing. Inspired by Queen Latifah, Reynolds wrote poetry all through his teen years and through college, even as he failed English classes. Two things began to turn Reynolds onto literature and poetry: rap music in the form of Queen Latifah’s album Black Reign as a young kid, and Richard Wright’s novel Black Boy as an older teen. Because of this, he didn’t read a novel until he was 17. While a young student, Reynolds grew frustrated by what his teachers assigned him to read-he found that he couldn’t identify with the characters or get interested in books that seemed to have little to do with his lived experience. Reynolds grew up in Oxon Hill, Maryland, an unincorporated suburb of Washington, D.C.
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