Hey everybody. Welcome to the latest edition of this week in Marvel. I'm Ben Morse,

the editorial director of digital media here at Marvel and we got a good one lined up today. I've got

Jason Reynolds on the line the author of the Miles Morales Pro's novel.

Jason, how are you doing today? I'm good, Ben. I'm good. I'm good.

Yeah man, absolutely.

It's a pleasure.

The novel is doing incredibly well.

Obviously, getting you on the show is a big deal.

We want to talk all about it.

But first, before we go there, I want to talk about you a little bit for people

who aren't familiar with your background. Talk to me about how you got into writing, how you

got into novels, and just your basic story. So my story is a little different than most people when it comes to getting into writing.

I grew up from Washington, D.C. and I grew up sort of a kid who what now people

referred to as reluctant readers you know I was a kid who did not I didn't I

didn't like reading but not because I didn't actually actually like reading but because I didn't feel like there were any books that spoke to me and my experiences

And so because of that especially during the the 1980s, there were very few books for young people about what was actually going on in our lives, specifically coming from black and brown communities.

So we had to, so we were forced to read books from the 60s and

70s and from the 50s that was sort of like outlining what black life was like

except for it was the 1980s and black life was vastly different because we're talking about like I mean think about the time period right so we're talking about the crack epidemic which tore our neighborhoods apart we're talking about the beginning of HIV right we're talking about the beginning of HIV, right? We're talking about the beginning of hip-hop music.

And these are things that were embedded into my reality and never shown in books.

So I didn't read anything. And my, until I was like 17 and a half, 18 years old, all the

way through school, everything. And so my sort of entree into literature came when I was around 9 or 10 years old I would read

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