Renée Watson is a bestselling author, educator, and community activist whose books have sold over one million copies, topping the New York Times bestselling list. Her poetry and fiction describe the experiences of Black girls and women in Portland and New York City and explore themes of home, identity, and the intersections of race, class, and gender. Her children's picture books and novels for teens have received several awards and earned international recognition.

Watson was born in Paterson, New Jersey, on July 29, 1978, to Sydney Roy Watson, who grew up in Jamaica, and Carrie Elizabeth Cooke from West Virginia. Watson moved to Portland in 1981 following her parents’ divorce, where she lived in the Vernon neighborhood (northeast Portland) with her mother and older siblings. Watson first learned poetry at the nearby Antioch Missionary Baptist Church, where she sang in the choir, acted in plays, and learned to speak and perform in front of an audience. She attended public school in Portland at Vernon Elementary, Binnsmead Middle School, and Jefferson High School, where she graduated in 1996. She wrote for the school newspaper, The Jeffersonian, and for the Rites of Passage literary magazine. A one-act play she wrote in high school was performed at the Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center in Portland.

From 1998 to 2005, Watson mentored students at the I Have a Dream Foundation, Self Enhancement, Inc., and as a Writer in Residence for Literary Arts in Portland. In 2005, after working with young people and observing how arts transformed their lives, she moved to New York City and enrolled in The New School to study creative arts therapy; she graduated with a BA in 2009. Watson worked as a teaching artist and consultant for arts education organizations providing professional development workshops, coaching, and mentorships on the intersection of social justice and art for nonprofits, including Writers in the Schools, the Lincoln Center, and DreamYard.

In 2010, Watson published the picture book, A Place Where Hurricanes Happen, to help children cope with Hurricane Katrina. That same year she published the children’s book What Momma Left Me, about a young Black girl who has lost her mother. Since her debut, Watson has published over twenty books for all reading levels, from picture books to adult fiction and nonfiction. Her work has appeared in several anthologies, including Black Enough (2019), and her biography of Oprah Winfrey was published for the She Persisted book series (2021). Her book of poems, Black Girl You Are Atlas (2024), won the Walter Dean Myers Award.

Several of Watson’s publications have been recognized for their “outstanding merit,” including her middle and young adult fiction featuring young Black girls navigating race and gender issues in their schools and communities. Her picture book, Harlem's Little Blackbird (2013), was nominated for an NAACP Image Award, and she co-wrote a biography for middle readers, Betty Before X, with Ilyasah Shabazz in 2018, which made the Schomburg Center’s Black Liberation Reading List for Kids.

Her Ryan Hart series, which Watson fashioned after Beverly Cleary’s Ramona novels, describes the experiences of a Black girl living in and attending school in Portland. Her young adult novel, Piecing Me Together (2017), whose protagonist is a Black high school student attending a predominantly white private school in Portland, won the Coretta Scott King Author Award, the Josette Frank Award, and a Newbery Medal. “Every city has a story,” Watson said in a 2024 interview about her Portland-based stories. “I wanted the city of Portland to be more than a setting, but a character with a backstory….I grew up with very little knowledge of the history of Black folks in Portland, but I felt the racial tension in the city. I knew there was something different about the parks on my side of town versus the White side of town.”

From 2016 to 2019, Watson founded and served as executive director of I, Too, Arts Collective, a nonprofit located in Langston Hughes’ former brownstone in New York organized to support historically “underrepresented communities in the creative arts.” As of 2025, she lives in New York City with her husband, photographer David Flores, and their children.