Renée Watson
Renée Watson (born July 29, 1978, Paterson, New Jersey, U.S.) is an American author and actress who has written picture books for young children and novels for young adults. Her young adult novel Piecing Me Together (2017) won the 2018 Coretta Scott King Book Award. That same year, it was also named a Newbery Honor Book and was recognized with the Josette Frank Award, a children’s literature award that recognizes works that are sources of inspiration to young people.
Watson was born in New Jersey but grew up in Portland, Oregon. She wanted to be a writer from an early age, and her mother helped nurture her interest. As a child, Watson would often write stories, title them, and read them to her family. When she was in middle school, she wrote a play that her classmates then performed for the school’s spring production. In 2005, pursuing her interest in writing, Watson attended The New School, a research university in Manhattan, New York City, where she studied creative writing and drama therapy.
In 2010 Watson had two books published: the young adult novel What Momma Left Me and the picture book A Place Where Hurricanes Happen. What Momma Left Me follows a young teenager as she rebuilds her life after the death of her mother and the departure of her father. A Place Where Hurricanes Happen shows the lives of four young friends in New Orleans, before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005.
Watson followed up the success of her first two books with the picture book Harlem’s Little Blackbird (2012). In it she tells the story of Florence Mills, an entertainer popular during the Harlem Renaissance. The young adult novel This Side of Home (2015) tackles cultural and racial issues through the theme of gentrification. Watson’s award-winning Piecing Me Together deals with socioeconomic status, racial stereotypes, and identity issues. She then wrote, with American author Ilyasah Shabazz, Betty Before X (2018), a fictionalized version of the life of civil rights activist Betty Shabazz (Ilyasah Shabazz’s mother) before she met Malcolm X (Shabazz’s father). Subsequent works include Watch Us Rise (2019; written with American writer and performer Ellen Hagan), Some Places More than Others (2019), Ways to Make Sunshine (2020), and Love Is a Revolution (2021).
Besides writing, Watson performed in Roses Are Red, Women Are Blue, a one-woman show that premiered at the Lincoln Center in New York City. She also taught poetry to middle-school and high-school students and conducted theatre workshops to help young people deal with trauma. In 2016 she founded the nonprofit organization I, Too Arts Collective to support the arts for underrepresented communities in Harlem and beyond.