# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely, who were featured in the January 2016 issue of The Writer, have received the inaugural Walter Dean Myers Award for outstanding children's literature in the YA category for their jointly written novel All American Boys. "The Walter" is administered by We Need Diverse Books, which addresses the lack of diversity in children's literature. Kiely and Reynolds met in 2014 when Simon and Schuster sent the two first-time authors on tour together. That summer, while they traveled the country, police brutality dominated the news, and the authors started talking through the issues. They felt they had a duty to respond, so they wrote All American Boys, the story of two high school boys - Rashad, who's black, and Quinn, who's white - who get tangled up in a police brutality incident. In the process of writing, the men's friendship grew, and they learned about sharing the craft of writing - as well as humility, grace and courage - from each other.

You can read the shorter interview here. TW writer Megan Kaplon provided the longer interview, which follows.

TW: What was the most inspiring part of writing this book for you?
JR: I wrote Rashad's half, which was the story of the victim, and I think that was a story that everyone, including myself, feels like they know very well, and therefore, I was more interested in what Brendan was going to do. The whole country knows the character of Rashad. The whole country has seen what has been happening with young people of color being brutalized by police officers. What we don't talk about enough is the story of the Quinns of the world and how they're processing and dealing and where they stand in the midst of all these things. If nothing more, I was more inspired by Brendan's courage and by his articulation of a very complicated thing. It's easy to talk about the victim. It's harder to talk about all the other people around who may or may not be complicit.

TW: Where there any bumps in the road that came up in the writing process?
BK: No. Everybody wants that to be the case, but it just isn't. The process of mimicking reality really made it easy to not have as many possible conflicts. What I mean is, just as in too many cities in America, you have people living side by side, but they are living such different stories. Our book mimics that reality so we avoided a lot of pitfalls by just being honest to the communities that we were writing about. Each community has its things to celebrate, and so too do the different voices we write in. I don't have to pretend I know Rashad's neighborhood and Jason doesn't have to pretend he knows Quinn's family. We can just do it honestly and authentically. And then, because the two stories are bound together in the same book, it's a mirror for some readers - either narrative will be - and it's a window for some readers - either narrative will be - and it's also a doorway into the conversation between those communities and those two characters.

TW: Did you have any issues getting the book published?
JR: We wrote the book in secrecy. Our agents didn't know; nobody knew until it was complete. We finished the novel and then presented it to our agents and the book was sold in like three days. But had we not done it that way, there might have been issues. It's a heavy topic, and if it goes wrong, if we do it poorly, it could be a major hit to our careers. So it was our job to do our due diligence to make sure we were the obvious choice. If we're going to do this thing, we're going to do it 100 percent, and then if they deny us they are fools.

BK: Hats off to Simon and Schuster. They went with it and they backed it 100 percent and they're not shying away from the real difficulty of the book, which is police brutality, individual racism and bigotry, and systematic racism.

TW: How was the revision process for this novel different than writing alone?
JR: The biggest difference was we didn't have time because they fast-tracked the book. So on your revision passes, you'd have 10 days instead of a normal two to three months. But the flip side was, we only had half a book each.

BK: The final round of copy edits was finished at the end of July, and the book was already available in September. It's crazy how quickly this process came together.

JR: That's also why we have to give hats off to our editor Caitlyn Dlouhy, because fast-tracking a book can be really, really dangerous. You can miss things, because everything is moving so quickly. But Caitlin and her delegation made sure that we closed up every gap.

TW: Why do you think first-person point of view works so well for YA fiction?
JR: First person is amazing for immediacy and for building a visceral tangibility. You can't be at a distance of a person who is talking to you in a natural voice. There is no omniscient narrator, no untouchable voice. This is a tangible voice and it's speaking directly to you, so you can't turn away.

BK: I think it's also true that more and more adult literature for the past decade has been dominated by first-person storytelling, and I would credit David Sedaris and Candace Bushnell for reinventing what it means to do literature. What they did was tell stories in a voice that could not be ignored. I think that's what dominates all literature, and I wouldn't make a distinction between YA and adult.

TW: How do you decide how much slang to include in the dialogue you write?
JR: For me, as a person of the African American community in an urban setting, I think slang is extremely important because it's important culturally to the community for many reasons, one of which is the notion of code-switching, of coded language. Slang has always been a way for us to say things without anyone understanding them. I don't necessarily mind if the slang is defunct. I know people are always like, "What happens if this is no longer relevant?" Well, then I think it time-stamps the book in a powerful way. You can't overuse it because then if becomes sort of buffoonery, but I think it's always helpful to use some. It colors the work a bit. It adds some edge and some oomph.

TW: What are your tips for forming dialogue?
JR: Dialogue is interesting because it seems like it's so difficult to write for so many people, but for me it's all about being specific and being detailed in that which is natural. I think people have a hard time doing that because it seems really stupid, but it is also the thing that can jump off the page. So like, if I'm writing this sentence right here, I would write, "So, like." Everybody is like, "You can't put that in there because it sounds silly," but to the human mind, when it reads it, it sounds familiar.

BK: I agree. The number one skill any writer can cultivate is listening. You want to be a listener so you hear what people are saying and hold onto it so you can recognize their reality as much as possible, but also as a writer to use that in your work, dialogue included.

TW: How do you walk the fine line between including a message in your book and being too heavy-handed?
BK: I spend a lot of time writing the message out first, so I know what I'm trying to say. If I just leave it in my mind and I haven't made it reality in writing yet, I'm not sure I've fully thought through the idea. I've got to get it out first and then rewrite it. It's not that I'm trying to mask the message; it's more that I'm trying to be authentic to how we actually communicate. In everyday hanging out, nobody is like, "I'm going to present you this agenda and you're going to listen for half an hour and then present your rebuttal." So I may begin like that, and then make it more human.

TW: What was your relationship to reading and writing like as a kid?
BK: When I was in elementary school and middle school, I didn't really read. I couldn't get into it. But going into high school, I was assigned all of this summer reading, and I was really nervous going into a new school. I felt like I had to do some work. One of the books I had to read was the first in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. What a brilliant idea, whosever idea it was to put that on the list, because holy crap I was so invested. Over summer vacation, I read all three of those books. That got me into it.

JR: For me, no reading, no reading, no reading. Back then, in the '80s and '90s, it was tricky. Other than Walter Dean Myers, there wasn't much literature for young people of color. So I wasn't interested in it, because I couldn't connect. For me, the breakthrough was Queen Latifah. She was a hero to me. I studied her lyrics. Then there was the discovery of poetry and then poetry became my number one thing. I didn't read a novel until I was 17, and it was Richard Wright's Black Boy. That book changed everything because he sounded like my family, the way he spoke. Now, when I sit at the page, all I can think of are all the little Jasons who need something to read that they can see themselves in - that they can connect with. It needs to sound like them, it needs to mirror and mimic their energy so they can sit with it.

Megan Kaplon is a contributing editor to The Writer.

Photo: Jake Belcher, who shoots for The Writer, took this image at the Boston Public Library during the Boston Book Festival in 2015.

Originally Published

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely - The Writer

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely, who were featured in the January 2016 issue of The Writer , have received the inaugural Walter Dean Myers Award for outstanding children's literature in the YA category for their jointly written novel All American Boys. "The Walter" is administered by We Need Diverse Books, which addresses the lack of diversity in children's literature.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Education & Training

Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) is a leadership training and development program that prepares full-time, college-enrolled students for service opportunities in the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force and Space Force (the Coast Guard offers a similar program called the College Student Pre-Commissioning Initiative [CSPI]). Joining ROTC opens a door to professional skills development, scholarship opportunities and tuition assistance, and, upon completion, attaining the rank of officer. Today, ROTC is offered at more than 1,700 colleges and universities.

Benefits of Joining ROTC

Students who join ROTC can apply for a scholarship. The scholarship covers full or partial cost of tuition, fees and books as well as a monthly stipend for four years. These benefits are in exchange for mandatory active-duty service after completing ROTC. Academic advisors and on-campus ROTC recruiters will be able to answer questions about these benefits and expectations.

When students accept an ROTC scholarship, complete the program and graduate from their college or university, they are commissioned as officers in the Military . Officers oversee and are directly responsible for leading service members under them in the chain of command. Typically, officers are employed in management roles or highly specialized fields that require professional degrees.

ROTC: Scholarship Opportunities

Length :35 View Transcript

Transcription

One key aspect of the Air Force ROTC program is that the opportunity for a scholarship exists during their high school senior year or while they're in college. Buffalo scholarships cover full tuition, so regardless of when a student wants to join ROTC, whether it's before college or while they're in college, an opportunity to receive a scholarship is there. The scholarship opportunities do exist for both private schools and public schools. They have the ability to earn a stipend monthly in their autism scholarship program, as well as to attend multiple and various different professional development training seminars. So, there are a lot of benefits in ROTC.

ROTC Programs Across the Services

The Coast Guard does not offer ROTC, but it does have a similar scholarship program called the College Student Pre-Commissioning Initiative (CSPI). This program is for students who demonstrate academic and leadership excellence and a desire to serve in the Coast Guard.

The Army ROTC program is currently offered at more than 1,000 colleges and universities across the U.S. When enrolled, the participants receive an education in topics such as leadership, military tactics, survival training and more. There is also a summer training requirement for certain participants, as well as an elective program involving training for parachute jumps, real-world leadership opportunities with active-duty service members and more.

In exchange for a service commitment, Army ROTC can provide a two-, three- or four-year scholarship, which is based on the time remaining to complete a degree. The four-year curriculum combines classroom and leadership work. During the summer between junior and senior years, there is a four-week Advanced Camp (AC) at Fort Knox, Kentucky. Upon graduation from college and successful completion of AC, they are commissioned as officers in their choice of the Army, Army Reserve or Guard.

Those who do not complete the requirements of instruction during the freshman and sophomore years must participate in a four-week training camp, called Basic Camp (also at Fort Knox), except for those who have previously completed any Service-enlisted Basic Training course or have completed a certified Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps (JROTC) program. Once Basic Camp is completed, participants are eligible to receive the same benefits as individuals in the four-year program.

Marine Corps ROTC

It may come as a surprise, but the Navy runs the ROTC program for both the Navy and the Marine Corps and this ROTC program is the largest single source of Navy and Marine Corps officers. Students who join Marine Corps ROTC receive education and training that can prepare them for leadership positions in an increasingly technical Marine Corps.

Earning a Marine Corps ROTC Scholarship

Length 2:58 View Transcript

Transcription

When individuals initially consider joining an organization, they typically ask themselves, "What can this organization do for me? What qualities will I gain, and how can I contribute to making the organization better?"

The NROTC program, which stands for Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps, is utilized to commission officers in the United States Navy and Marine Corps. The mission of the Marine Corps NROTC program is to mentally, morally, and physically develop midshipmen, instilling in them the highest values of honor, courage, and commitment.

Each recruiting district independently screens its applicants. To apply for the program, students must reach out to their local recruiter. The recruiting districts use a competitive selection board to screen applicants. Those selected on this board receive a four-year scholarship and then embark on their four-year program through the NROTC unit.

There are over 60 NROTC units across the nation, each maintaining its own college program. This offers an opportunity for non-scholarship students to still be a midshipman through two or three-year side-load scholarships. These side-load scholarships provide a chance for students who didn't receive the four-year scholarship or may have missed the application deadline to remain competitive nationally and receive a two or three-year scholarship depending on their college career stage.

Upon acceptance into the program, students embark on a four-year training cycle. The first three years focus on preparing them for Officer Candidate School, after which they return for their senior year and are commissioned as a second lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps.

You can have a completely normal college experience here. I chose kinesiology due to my sports background and a keen interest in learning about nutrition and physical fitness, which I believe will benefit my career. Besides taking additional naval science classes on naval history and warfare, you have the flexibility to study anything, providing a normal student lifestyle.

After graduation and commissioning, I'll be sent to the Basic School for the Marine Corps, immersing me in the role of a basic rifle platoon commander, teaching what it's like to be a true leader of Marines. Officer Candidate School assesses your desire to pursue it, while the Basic School is about putting what you've learned into action.

The program is not just about tuition; while it's a valuable benefit, there are priceless aspects like the responsibilities you gain, the development of leadership skills, and learning to face failures and move forward. These are qualities students acquire throughout the program, carrying them into their Marine Corps career. This program is an investment in the Marine Corps' future, investing four years of tuition to train and develop motivated individuals ready to serve the nation and lead Marines.

When enrolled in Navy ROTC (NROTC) to become an officer in the Marine Corps (i.e., Marine-option cadets), the curriculum includes studying Marine Corps history and traditions, the evolution of warfare, amphibious warfare and all elements of the Marine Air-Ground Task Force (MAGTF). Students receive instruction in management, leadership and ethics throughout the four years in the program.

Offered at 170 colleges and universities across the United States, the primary mission of the Navy ROTC (NROTC) program is to instruct and prepare participants to lead as officers. Much of the professional training that occurs during this four-year curriculum happens at summer training programs. Upon graduation, students who complete all academic requirements in the NROTC program commission as ensigns in the Navy or second lieutenants in the Marine Corps (specifics about the Marine Corps ROTC are above).

NROTC Preparatory Program is a one-year academic and military program that can help improve a student's eligibility for NROTC scholarships while also providing a foundation for academic success at a sponsoring university. As part of this program, NROTC preparatory scholarship reservations (NPSR) partners with educational institutions to enhance underserved or disadvantaged scholarship applicants' moral, mental and physical foundations.

Air Force ROTC

AFROTC is a four-year program offered in nearly 1,100 colleges and universities in the United States, Puerto Rico and Hawaii. It entails two distinct two-year courses: the General Military Course (GMC) and the Professional Officer Course (POC).

Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps (JROTC)

JROTC prepares student participants for life beyond the high school classroom with courses about leadership, health and wellness, physical fitness, first aid, geography, American history and government, communications and emotional intelligence. The program also teaches "soft skills" in the areas of collaboration, personal reflection and critical thinking.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) is a college program offered at more than 1,700 colleges and universities that prepares students to become officers in the U.S. Military.

# data[].attributes.body
These are Rashad's favorite comics as a kid.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
See what the Royal Membership is all about.

Comics Kingdom

The best comic strips, political cartoons and puzzles in all the land.

Love Comics?

Sign up to receive weekly updates and news from around the kingdom.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
See what the Royal Membership is all about. The best comic strips, political cartoons and puzzles in all the land. Sign up to receive weekly updates and news from around the kingdom.

# data[].attributes.headline
Timeline of high-profile police brutalities and protests 

# data[].attributes.subject
Timeline of high-profile police brutalities and protests 

# data[].attributes.body
Read through these high-profile events.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
George Floyd: Timeline of black deaths and protests

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A look back at the deaths of black Americans since the emergence of Black Lives Matter.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Alex Wong/Getty Images

It's happening in train stations in New York and Philadelphia. It's happening on the sidewalks in San Francisco, and it's happening on college campuses across the country.

Hundreds of people are laying motionless on the ground, pretending to be dead. They are staging die-ins, a form of protests during which participants simulate death in areas with high foot traffic, to grab the attention of passersby.

This week, die-in participants are protesting a grand jury's decision not to indict Daniel Pantaleo, a white Staten Island police officer who placed Eric Garner, an unarmed black man, in a choke hold that killed him, all on camera. Last week, they were protesting a similar decision in the case of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager shot and killed by Darren Wilson, a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri.

It's not surprising that photos of these die-ins have been shared widely across social media. The images of the unmoving bodies strewn on the floor are haunting. It's difficult to look away. Die-ins are meant to elicit feelings of grief and shock, emotions that people tend to want to experience alongside others when it comes to disturbing national news.

Die-ins have been used to protest American-fought wars and foreign conflicts like those in Gaza, and by anti-abortion and gun-control activists. On Sept. 15, 2007, hundreds of people sprawled out on a walkway in front of the Capitol to protest the Iraq War, 189 of whom were arrested by police.

The exact origins of the die-in in the United States are tough to pin down. Its close relative, the sit-in, is much more common, and became a staple of the civil-rights movement, most notably in Greensboro, N.C., and Nashville, Tennessee, in 1960.

A few users on H-Net, an online forum for researchers and teachers to discuss the arts, humanities, and social sciences, tried to answer the question in 2012. User Jon Pennington pointed out that the Oxford English Dictionary dates the earliest appearance of the word "die-in" to 1970. His research suggested that the first die-ins were organized by environmental activists. From a March 6, 1970 article in The Harvard Crimson:

Harvard Ecology Action (HEA) will sponsor a "die-in" at Logan International Airport to protest environmental pollution on April 22 as part of "Earth Day"-a national teach-in to increase ecological awareness.

And from a United Press International article in The Milwaukee Journal on April 21, 1960, about a environmental protest in Boston:

Thousands were expected to join a "survival march" and "festival of death" in Boston, wearing green armbands bearing the Greek letter theta-astrological symbol for death. The "festival of death" plans to include a creeping motorcade to Logan International Airport during the rush hour, a mock funeral and a "die-in" protesting airport noise and pollution.

On May 25, 1970, the term "die-in" jumped to the West Coast, and to another cause. From an AP article in The Milwaukee Journal about a protest against a proposed nerve gas repository in Seattle:

Formation of an Anchorage chapter of People Against Nerve Gas (PANG) was announced Sunday. A Seattle chapter of the same group which filed a court suit opposing shipment of the gas through the Northwest last week staged a "die-in" in downtown Seattle to symbolize what could happen if the gas escaped during shipment.

Pennington says that placement of the word "die-in" in quotes in these stories suggests that the word was new in 1970.

Some publications have put the word in quotes in recent weeks, but this form of protest can't be considered new anymore. Nor has the country seen the last of them. Here are a few photos of what this year's die-ins have looked like:
This piece originally appeared in National Journal, an Atlantic partner site. More from National Journal: This State is "Ground Zero" for 2016 Meet the First Undocumented Med-School Student at UC San Francisco The Annotated Lyrics of That Incredible Hillary 2016 Song

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
It's happening in train stations in New York and Philadelphia. It's happening on the sidewalks in San Francisco, and it's happening on college campuses across the country. Hundreds of people are laying motionless on the ground, pretending to be dead.