Joseph Coelho and Jason Reynolds have plenty in common. Both are award-winning authors who are currently national representatives for children’s literature: earlier this year, Coelho became the UK children’s laureate, while Reynolds holds the equivalent role in the US, the national ambassador for young people’s literature. They are around the same age (Coelho is 42 and Reynolds is 38), both found a love for words through poetry, and both are Black writers passionate about making the white-dominated world of children’s books more diverse. They also both never read books as young children.
Coelho grew up in a single parent family in Roehampton, south-west London, with “a teen mother who was doing her best, but had herself left school at a very young age”. He wasn’t read to at home, and couldn’t read properly until he was about seven or eight. At that point, he managed to catch up with his peers and found a love of books through his local library’s summer reading challenge. An inspirational school visit from “the late great” Jean “Binta” Breeze made him realise that he could be a writer too, and ultimately sparked his career as a poet and picture-book author.
Reynolds, meanwhile, grew up in Oxon Hill, Maryland, and didn’t read books until even later, when he was 17 or 18, although before that he used to read the liner notes of rap cassettes. He identifies the album Black Reign by Queen Latifah as the reason he became an author, writing poetry first, and then the novels for children and teenagers for which he is now best known.
The pair, both dressed in all black, are meeting during their brief overlap in tenures: Coelho became laureate earlier this year, and will stay in the role until 2024, while Reynolds started his two-year ambassadorship in January 2020: “I’m just about to bow out!” Each writer is endearingly impressed by the other.
“Can I call you Joe?”, Reynolds checks, before admitting that he has “done all this research” on Coelho and is “super happy” that he has been chosen as laureate. The British author is quick to return the compliment, declaring himself a big fan of Reynolds.
Both authors laugh when I ask them if they were exposed to books by people of colour as children. It wasn’t until secondary school that Coelho studied a book by someone who wasn’t white, he says. “It’s really hard to put across the impact of that.” Now that the two writers have a chance to make a difference to children’s reading opportunities, they are passionate about making sure that young people from every kind of background are represented in the books they read. “You can’t be what you can’t see,” says Reynolds, who is sure he would have started reading sooner had he seen himself in the books he was being offered. When he was a child, authors were such a distant concept to him that he believed books were written by machines. “And these machines apparently didn’t know I existed.”
Reynolds, who now lives in Washington DC, was writing for years before he got his break with his 2014 YA novel When I Was the Greatest, about three Black teenage boys growing up in Brooklyn.
Since then, he has published eight more novels in four years, including the New York Times bestselling Track series and the novel-in-verse Long Way Down, which was later adapted by Danica Novgorodoff into a Kate Greenaway award-winning graphic novel. In 2019 he published the Carnegie-winning Look Both Ways, a collection of interlinked short stories about walking home from school. His most recent book, Oxygen Mask, published earlier this year, is an astonishing graphic novel created with his long-time collaborator, the artist Jason Griffin, that takes in both the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests spurred by the murder of George Floyd.
Coelho, now based in Kent, studied for a degree in archaeology before taking on jobs as a gym instructor, a salesman and even as an extra in the teen spy film Agent Cody Banks 2. Always writing in his spare time, he started making money from poetry after taking a performance poetry course at Battersea Arts Centre, and spent many years running creative writing workshops in schools, writing plays and performing his poetry. His poems were published in print for the first time in his 2014 collection Werewolf Club Rules, which won the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education’s poetry award. He has since written more collections, as well as novels and picture books – including Our Tower, published earlier this year, which Guardian reviewer Imogen Russell Williams called a “glowing, poetic picture book” which “celebrates the joys of community in urban spaces while quietly affirming that the natural world belongs to everyone”.
Some of the issues the writers faced as children are still pressing today: according to a report by the National Literacy Trust earlier this year, almost one in five children in England between the ages of five and eight do not have a book of their own at home. And of course, even among the children who do have access to books, there are those who, like the young Reynolds, simply have no interest in reading.
The American writer is quick to note that “when we say we want our kids to read, the subtext is we want our kids to read novels”. While he now loves novels, he found it hard to connect with them as a child, and knows that others like him may struggle too. “Is it more important that our young people have relationships with literature, or relationships with literacy?” has been the question he’s asked throughout his time as ambassador. “And if literacy is the answer, that means they should be able to read anything.”
Poetry was a gateway into literature for both Reynolds and Coelho, and both believe it can be a great starting point for today’s children, too. “Its economy is important for young people today, who have attention spans of a minute and a half,” Reynolds says. And it’s even better if children are encouraged to write their own poetry, Coelho says. “So many people feel left out, feel their voices aren’t valid, feel like they’ve got no options.” Encouraging children to write poetry about what interests them shows them that their voices matter, he says.
Introducing children to poetry shouldn’t always be done with a view to getting them to study it academically, Coelho adds. “I love analysing poetry, but it’s not for everyone.” And the authors agree that the definition of what counts as poetry needs widening. Reynolds remembers being asked once on a BBC radio show if he really believed that rap music was poetry. “And I was like, ‘Well, do you believe that Dylan is poetry? Is John Lennon a poet?’ ‘Of course,’ [the presenter] says. And I’m like, ‘Why is this a question?’”
Neither author has much time for such snobbish attitudes towards rap – but Coelho points out that it’s also frustrating when it’s assumed that he, a Black performance poet, must be a rapper. “I can’t rap. I’d love to be able to, but I can’t,” he says, a fact that is sometimes met with disappointment by teachers when he visits schools. “The suggestion that kids will only be interested in one particular type [of poetry], or that one is better than the other, is complete nonsense.” Give children variety, Coelho says, because then they can discover where their passions lie, and “it’s through passion that you get kids interested in reading”.
The worry that offering children and teenagers greater literary variety will erase the classics (as evidenced by the negative reaction to poems by Wilfred Owen and Philip Larkin being taken off the exam board OCR’s GCSE syllabus) is an unfounded one, both Coelho and Reynolds firmly believe. Getting young people interested in contemporary writers actually “preserves the classics”, Reynolds says, “because you create readers”.
If children are only exposed to books they struggle to connect with, it could put them off reading altogether, he argues. “A 14-year-old who doesn’t want to read Keats today might read him at 25, because today they were reading Danez Smith.” Taking classics off syllabuses won’t make them disappear, he adds. “They’re not going away. The cream rises to the top: if they’re as good as everybody says, they’ll exist.”
Another controversial issue in the children’s book world, particularly in America, is the rising number of books being banned. A “rapid acceleration” of book censorship in US school districts was reported by PEN America earlier this year, with more than 2,500 different book bans having been implemented over the previous school year.
Reynolds’s own books have been among the most frequently banned titles, including All American Boys, a young adult novel the author co-wrote with Brendan Kiely about two boys facing racism and police brutality. The reasons given for its banning include the fact that it contains profanity and drug and alcohol use, as well as being thought by some to promote anti-police views.
The author is used to being unpopular with certain parents and teachers. “I’ve been banned for years. I’ve been banned ever since the beginning of my career,” he says. But the “very loud minority” fighting for these bans are far outweighed by those fighting against them, he says. “And I’m one of these sort of woowoo guys who does believe in some of the esotericism of art, that it will find its way, it will find who it’s for.”
Reynolds’s main worry is that censored books are removed from school libraries. “I have no qualms over you wanting to adjust your curriculum, I honestly don’t. It’s not my place … I’m just asking that you leave the books available, so that the young people who might want to read these books can get them.” That said, on a personal level, it still “hurts a lot” when his books are banned. “What it assumes, implicitly, is that I would do something to harm children,” he says. “I would never do such a thing, nor would any of my colleagues.”
Do they think it is ever acceptable to prevent children or teenagers from reading certain books, those that promote racist or prejudiced views, for example? Coelho is sceptical of directing children’s reading habits too much: “There’s so much baggage that comes with the ‘right’ things to be reading.” He thinks encouraging children towards “nourishing” books could be more effective than removing titles altogether. “I always see books as a kind of safe space where you can explore multiple ideas, get multiple viewpoints. I think that’s important,” he says.
Reynolds agrees – children can be exposed to many kinds of books “as long as there’s counterbalance”. He points out that many children are living in “dicey worlds” and can handle more than we give them credit for – he doesn’t “want young people to believe that the world exists without dissent”. So he’s comfortable with young people reading the titles he was assigned at school: books by Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Flannery O’Connor (“who says the N-word more than any writer, although she’s lauded as if she doesn’t.”)
“But also give [them] Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston and James Baldwin and Audre Lorde,” he says. Then students can see for themselves that “this person might be a bigot, but this story bucks the stereotype that this person is presenting”.
“That’s how you learn to think,” Coelho adds, but admits that “increasingly, I’m finding it a lot harder just to have a discussion and a debate”.
“It’s all: you’re either with me or against me, and that’s it. I don’t see how humanity can survive.” For this to change, conversations about different lives and views need to start early, and they need to start in the home, Reynolds believes. He is a strong advocate of starting a “book club in the house”, so that children and parents can “wrestle with complicated ideas together”.
Families reading together could also help to improve literacy in both children and adults, Coelho points out. Illiteracy can be a generational issue, and the poet attributes his own struggles with reading as a child to the fact that there wasn’t a culture of reading in his home. “Ironically, I found out as an adult, that my nan writes poems,” he says. “She’s a big reader, but she never read to her kids.”
The lack of literary role models in their own lives has obviously made both authors think carefully about the kind of figureheads they want to be. Coelho makes clear that he doesn’t just want to be an inspiration for Black children: “I think it’s important that [all young people] see authors of all races and ethnicities and backgrounds, because society is complex and mixed.”
“I don’t just want to read about people that have my life experience,” he adds. “Yeah, I want to read those books. But I also want to read about people that have totally different life experiences from me, as we all should, because we all become richer through that process.”
Reynolds agrees – to an extent. While he too believes that all young people should look to all kinds of role models, he points out: “For some of us, in order for us to see the world, we have to see ourselves first.”
“I represent all of the young people, but I definitely want to be a springboard for the ones that just haven’t felt safe in literature or in the world,” he adds, in what feels like an apt closing statement for his time as national ambassador. “So that they can then see that the world is broad and big and beautiful. And theirs.”
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Joseph Coelho’s children’s books of the year
Fox & Son Tailers by Paddy Donnelly
(O’Brien, age 2+)
A beautiful book anchored in a simply brilliant idea … a world where animals have no tails: call in the Tailers! Genius.
The Girl Who Planted Trees by Caryl Hart and Anastasia Suvorova
(Nosy Crow, age 2-5)
An uplifting tale of how we can all make a difference to the damage done to the natural world. Incredibly empowering for young readers.
The Odd Fish by Naomi Jones and James Jones
(Farshore, age 3-6)
A sophisticated look at plastic pollution in a beautifully told and at times heartache-inducing story of one fish’s attempt to help “odd fish” find their family.
Courage in a Poem anthology
(Caterpillar, age 5+)
A stunning poetry anthology about courage, immigration, family and dedication, all gorgeously illustrated by Annalise Barber, Mariana Roldán, Masha Manapov and Nabila Adani.
Joyful Joyful, curated by Dapo Adeola, foreword by Patrice Lawrence
(Two Hoots, age 8-11)
A jubilant collection of short stories and poems celebrating Black voices, featuring Malorie Blackman, Sharna Jackson, Ken Wilson-Max and Dorcas Magbadelo.
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Jason Reynolds’ children’s books of the year
Luli and the Language of Tea by Andrea Wang and illustrated by Hyewon Yum (Holiday House, age 3-7)
A simple, profound story about how children already know many of our universal languages – in this case, it happens to be tea.
The First Cat in Space Ate Pizza by Mac Barnett and Shawn Harris
(HarperCollins, age 8-12)
A laugh-out-loud romp about … the first cat in space.
A Thousand Steps into Night by Traci Chee
(HarperCollins, age 12+)
Rich with magic and all the trappings of a good fantasy, this novel is less about the discovery of a world, and more about the discovery of the self.
All My Rage by Sabaa Tahir
(Little, Brown, age 12+)
A multi-generational story about what might lead to immigrating to the US, and the complicated nature of actually chasing the dream once you’ve arrived.
Break This House by Candice Iloh
(Dutton, age 12-14)
A tale of family fracture, forgiveness and discovering the truth about our perceived villains.
• Blow a Kiss, Catch a Kiss by Joseph Coelho is published by Andersen. Oxygen Mask by Jason Reynolds is published by Faber. Stuntboy, In the Meantime by Jason Reynolds is published by Knights Of.
