Ain't Burned All the Bright

Jason Reynolds’s Ain’t Burned All the Bright (2022) is a genre-bending YA book that combines poetic prose and visual art into a deeply personal work depicting a young Black boy’s experience of the 2020 global pandemic and the social upheaval that coincided with it. The book is narrated in first person and divided into three “Breaths”—each one a single extended sentence that reflects on various aspects of the experience and the psychological impact it is having on him and his family. Reynold’s poetry is combined with collage-like artwork by Jason Griffin that has been directly reproduced from his moleskin notebook to make the text appear like a journal. Together, the art and poetry explore the themes of Coping With the Overwhelming State of the World, The Healing Potential of Family and Art, and The Negative Effects of News Exposure. Reynolds is an award-winning author of both novels and poetry. His Track series is a New York Times best-seller, and the first entry in the series, Ghost (2016), was a National Book Award finalist; his YA novel As Brave as You (2017) won the Kirkus Prize and the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work for Youth/Teen; and his novel in verse,