As a middle-schooler in Portland, O.R., the author, performer, and educator Renée Watson jotted down stories and poems in Mead notebooks her mom had gifted her. It was in one such notepad that Watson wrote her first play, about an eighth-grade girl who was being bullied at school. The work caught the attention of her teacher, who selected it as her school’s spring performance. “I think that was the moment that I was like, ‘Oh, I'm a writer,’” she says. “I knew very early that I loved writing and that my voice mattered.” 

Watson, 47, has spent much of her nearly two-decade career helping young readers understand the complicated feelings that come with growing up. In 2010, she released her debut, A Place Where Hurricanes Happen, a picture book in free verse inspired by her time as a college student working with children grappling with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. That same year, she published her first middle-grade novel, What Momma Left Me, about a 13-year-old Black girl trying to make sense of the sudden death of her mother. “There are all kinds of ways in which our young people are grieving,” she says. “It’s so important to teach [kids] empathy and imagination, but also how you show up for someone and hold space with them.”

In the years since her debut, Watson has continued to publish to critical acclaim: her 2017 novel Piecing Me Together won the Coretta Scott King Award and became a New York Times bestseller. She returned to the theme of loss in 2025’s All the Blues in the Sky, which she wrote while mourning the deaths of her mother and a close childhood friend. The middle-grade book centers on a 13-year-old Black girl named Sage, who unexpectedly loses her best friend in a hit-and-run accident. When Sage attends grief counseling with girls her own age, she finds solace—and learns an important lesson. “We're together in this grief,” Watson says. “But we're absolutely together in our joys, too.”

In January, All the Blues in the Sky won the Newbery Medal, the annual honor from the Association for Library Service to Children for the most distinguished work of American children’s literature. Winning the Newbery is something Watson doesn’t take for granted. She recalls she had to fight to feature her protagonists—young Black girls with natural hair—on her book covers early in her career. “I'm very proud that I was part of that wave of authors who were trying to push the [publishing] industry to do right by us,” Watson says. But the work isn’t over. “I want to hold on to the reason why I write, and what’s at the center of it all,” she says. “That’s what’s most important.”