Renée Watson's Keynote: The Craft of Making You

Renée Watson inspired with
her call to action and
self-examination

Award winning creator Renée Watson captivated the audience with Ruth Forman's poem, "Poetry Should Ride the Bus," to open her keynote. She believes "poetry, stories and art should be about something, honor, critique and challenge. Everything we create should be in context with what is happening in the world, sometimes obvious and sometimes not."

The Coretta Scott King Award and Newbery Honor author continued, "We are creating at a time while children are in cages, white supremacists are emboldened, when children are being bullied not being enough. All of this happens while we are creating in our studios, polishing words to the page, and querying agents and editors."

She challenged the audience to examine themselves. She guided everyone through a series of questions for reflection about their motivation, goals, and direction before they head back home. In a word—powerful.

Her upcoming book

She ended with reminding us to "remember joy. Remember the children. We do this for them, because of them. We are making and creating for someone's best thing. Someone's hope. Someone's tomorrow. Handle this privilege with care."

 For more information about Renée, visit her website or follow her on Twitter.

Author Panel: Renée Watson

Renée Watson

Renée Watson is a New York Times best-selling author, educator, and activist. Her young adult novel, Piecing Me Together (Bloomsbury, 2017) received a Coretta Scott King Award and Newbery Honor. Her children’s picture books and novels have received several awards and international recognition. Her poetry and fiction often center around the lived experiences of black girls and women, and explore themes of home, identity, and the intersections of race, class, and gender.

Renée Watson, who names Portland, OR as her home SCBWI region, says every time she writes she's thinking about how that story matters, because she believes words matter, especially in the context of what kind of stories Black kids get to read. She puts that belief into practice in more than her own books, too—the creation of the I, Too Arts Collective brings the value of the written word directly to the Harlem community.


Her editorial experiences have been much more focused on the content of her books than her mastery of craft, and very much highlight the need for more stories about and for Black kids. For example, an editor said "this doesn't feel believable" about one of her books because the Black kids and families in it weren't traumatized enough.

On an uplifting note, she first and foremost writes for Black girls, but at one author event a white boy who had just read WATCH US RISE asked her how he can be better to his sisters and friends who are girls. So many times books like hers are put into the hands of Black girls, but she was so moved that a teacher put that book into that boy's hands. It's a memory she'll carry forever.

Follow Renee Watson on Twitter and Instagram, or get more info at her website.