Author Renee Watson
Shawnte Sims / OPB
This week we are taking you back to Portland Book Festival 2024, with a conversation on the theme of “reconciliation” featuring Renée Watson, discussing her latest book, “Skin & Bones,” and Joe Wilkins, author of “The Entire Sky,” plus one of my absolute favorite moderators, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author Mitchell S. Jackson.
Renée’s novel, “Skin & Bones,” is about a plus-size Black woman building a life in Portland, Oregon, and navigating motherhood, daughterhood, friendship, and romance. Joe Wilkins’ “The Entire Sky” is set in rural Montana, and the cast includes a grieving, aging rancher, his daughter, and a runaway teen boy as they search for home.
Despite the surface differences, the stories have a lot in common and the authors definitely had a lot to talk about. Moderator Mitchell S. Jackson does a wonderful job leading this conversation, covering common threads such as forgiveness, how fiction can be “the lie that tells the truth,” place and home. Every kind of reader will find something in this generous and wide-ranging conversation.
Bio:
Renée Watson is a #1 New York Times bestselling author. Over the past decade she has authored twenty books for young readers, which have collectively sold more than a million copies. She received a Coretta Scott King Award and a Newbery Honor for her novel “Piecing Me Together” and high praise for “1619 Project: Born on the Water,” co-written with Nikole Hannah-Jones. Her debut adult novel, “Skin & Bones,” was published May 7th, 2024. Watson is on the Council of Writers for the National Writing Project and is a member of the Academy of American Poets’ Education Advisory Council. She splits her time between Portland, Oregon and New York City. She is also the writer of “Black Girl You Are Atlas,” and “Cicely Tyson.”
Joe Wilkins is the author of the debut novel, “Fall Back Down When I Die,” praised as “remarkable and unforgettable” in a starred review at Booklist. A finalist for the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction and the Pacific Northwest Book Award, “Fall Back Down When I Die” won the High Plains Book Award and has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, and German. Wilkins is also the author of a memoir, “The Mountain and the Fathers,” and four collections of poetry, including “Thieve” and “When We Were Birds,” winner of the Oregon Book Award. Wilkins lives with his family in western Oregon, where he directs the creative writing program at Linfield University. His latest novel is “The Entire Sky.”
Mitchell S. Jackson is the winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing and the 2021 National Magazine Award in Feature Writing. Jackson’s debut novel, “The Residue Years,” won a Whiting Award and the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. His essay collection “Survival Math” was named a best book of 2019 by fifteen publications. Jackson’s other honors include fellowships, grants, and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Creative Capital, the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library, the Lannan Foundation, PEN America, and TED. His writing has been featured on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, Time, and Esquire, as well as in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, the Paris Review, the Guardian, and elsewhere. Jackson is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Esquire. He holds the John O. Whiteman Dean’s Distinguished Professorship in the Department of English at Arizona State University. Jackson’s latest book is “Fly: The Big Book of Basketball Fashion.”