Renée Watson author page

Renée Watson biography

Renée Watson is an American author, educator and community arts advocate whose works span picture books, middle grade and young adult fiction. She founded the nonprofit organisation I, Too, Arts Collective in 2016, housed in Langston Hughes’s former Harlem brownstone, to support youth arts and literary programmes.

Watson was born in Paterson, New Jersey and grew up in northeast Portland, Oregon. She attended The New School in New York, where she studied creative writing and earned a certificate in drama therapy. Before her publishing career, she spent more than twenty years teaching creative writing, poetry and theatre in public schools and community centres across the United States.

Her first two published books appeared in 2010: the picture book A Place Where Hurricanes Happen, inspired by her work with children in New Orleans, and the middle grade novel What Momma Left Me. Watson’s young adult novel Piecing Me Together, published in 2017, received a Coretta Scott King Author Award and a John Newbery Honor in 2018.

Other titles by Watson include This Side of Home, Watch Us Rise (co-written with Ellen Hagan), Love Is a Revolution, and the picture-book Harlem’s Little Blackbird: The Story of Florence Mills. Her book The 1619 Project: Born on the Water was published in collaboration with Nikole Hannah-Jones.

Watson’s adult debut novel, skin & bones, was published in May 2024. Her novel Piecing Me Together was a New York Times bestseller and holder of multiple children’s literature awards.