Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses anti-Black racism and racist violence.

Jason Reynolds is an award-winning author of novels and poetry for middle grade and young adult audiences, while Jason Griffin is an artist and long-time friend and collaborator of Reynolds. The two met in school and became close friends. In 2005, the pair moved to New York together and began collaborating, with Griffin providing visual art for Reynolds’s Poetry. In 2009, they published a memoir called My Name is Jason. Mine Too.: Our Story about their experience of moving to New York to pursue their artistic dreams. Over a decade later, during quarantine due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the two began collaborating again, this time, remotely. Griffin had been keeping artist’s journals as a means of processing everything. He would use a combination of sketches, paint, and whatever he could collage with, and he remarked to Reynolds that the process had been like an oxygen mask for him. This sparked an idea for Reynolds, who returned 24 hours later with the first section of the text. Reynolds gave Griffin free license to break up and arrange the text as he saw fit so that thematically the art fit and built the

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