When the writer Jason Reynolds speaks to young people, he rarely starts by talking about books.

“They’ve been hearing that all day, all year,” he said. Instead he talks about ramen noodles, Jordan 11s, the rapper DaBaby, “whatever it takes to get them engaged.”

Earlier this month , when Reynolds’s “Long Way Down” was selected as Baltimore’s “One Book Baltimore” pick, he came to the city to field questions about the book and sign copies for hundreds of middle school students. They listened to him as he compared hip-hop to poetry — “There’s a direct connection between Tupac and Langston Hughes” — and said that early rappers should’ve been considered “teenage geniuses .”

These events — he’s done about 50 this year — are a driving part of his work as a writer: to make black children and teenagers feel seen in real life as well as on the page. “I can talk directly to them in a way that I know they’re going to relate to because I am them,” Reynolds said, “and I still feel like them.”