Jason Reynolds

Stamped is a remix and says so on the cover. Jason Reynolds took Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning, a four-hundred-year academic history of racist ideas in America, and rewrote it for teenagers in his own voice, cutting the length by two thirds and refusing the register of a textbook. Kendi is credited throughout and wrote the introduction. Little, Brown published it in 2020. Reynolds, born in 1983 and raised in Oxon Hill, Maryland, came to writing through rap and finished no novel until his twenties; Long Way Down, a verse novel that unfolds over the sixty seconds of a lift ride, is the best known of the books that followed. He served as National Ambassador for Young People's Literature from 2020 to 2022. Stamped has since drawn more challenges in American school districts than almost any other title.