To call Walter Dean Myers a West Virginian, you have to rely on a somewhat narrow definition of the phrase. He was born in Martinsburg, but his mother died when he was a toddler and he was taken to Harlem to live with a couple there. The New York City area is the setting for many of his books, and he lives now in Jersey City.

In this photo from December 2010, author Walter Dean Myers takes a look around his old Harlem neighborhood. AP photo.

But when you get a national honor like Myers just did, everyone wants a piece of you, and we’ll happily claim our share.

Myers was announced as the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature on Wednesday, the third person to hold the position since it was created in 2008. He’ll formally accept the post in a ceremony next week at the Library of Congress, whose Center for the Book was one of two groups to choose Myers. The other was an arm of the Children’s Book Council, a trade group of children’s book publishers.

As ambassador — which The New York Times described as “a sort of poet laureate of the children’s book world who tours the country for two years, speaking at schools and libraries about reading and literacy” — Myers, 74, follows “Bridge to Terabithia” author Katherine Paterson (who also spent some time living in West Virginia) and “Time Warp Trio” author Jon Scieszka (who, I don’t know, probably drove through the state at some point).

Myers is very different from those authors, and from many young adult authors writing today. As Julie Bosman wrote in the Times:

The choice of Mr. Myers represents a departure from his predecessors and is likely to be seen as a bold statement. His books chronicle the lives of many urban teenagers, especially young, poor African-Americans. While his body of work includes poetry, nonfiction and the occasional cheerful picture book for children, its standout books offer themes aimed at young-adult readers: stories of teenagers in violent gangs, soldiers headed to Iraq and juvenile offenders imprisoned for their crimes.

While many young-adult authors shy away from such risky subject material, Mr. Myers has used his books to confront the darkness and despair that fill so many children’s lives.

But he does so, critics say, with a sense of possibility. Writing in The New York Times Book Review in 2008, Leonard S. Marcus praised Mr. Myers’s body of work. “Drugs, drive-by shootings, gang warfare, wasted lives — Myers has written about all these subjects with nuanced understanding and a hard-won, qualified sense of hope,” Mr. Marcus wrote.

He’s certainly got the resume for the job: two-time Newbery Honor winner (“Scorpions” and “Somewhere in the Darkness”), three-time National Book Award finalist (“Monster,” “Autobiography of My Dead Brother,” “Lockdown”) and numerous other awards. Still, it might sound strange to have a 74-year-old man hailed as someone who can relate to today’s teenagers in his books.

But Myers knows what he speaks of: he dropped out of high school, spent a few dead-end years in the Army, and worked a succession of jobs before finding his footing as a writer. In a profile last year by The Associated Press, he said:

“I know what falling off the cliff means … I know from being considered a very bright kid to being considered like a moron and dropping out of school.”

No matter what else was going on in his teenage life, though, Myers continued to read — and he says he wants to instill the idea that reading is not optional in today’s parents. The Times reported:

“I think that what we need to do is say reading is going to really affect your life,” he said in an interview at his book-cluttered house here in Jersey City, adding that he hoped to speak directly to low-income minority parents. “You take a black man who doesn’t have a job, but you say to him, ‘Look, you can make a difference in your child’s life, just by reading to him for 30 minutes a day.’ That’s what I would like to do.”