Williams-Garcia, Rita (1957-…), is an African American author of books for children and young people. She is known for her realistic portrayal of African American teenage life. She is also known for her portrayal of characters from the African diaspora. Diaspora refers to the scattering of a group of people. Williams-Garcia won the Coretta Scott King Award in 2011 for One Crazy Summer (2010). The novel is the first in a trilogy (three related novels). It tells the story of three African American sisters who travel from the borough of Brooklyn in New York City, New York, to Oakland, California, in the summer of 1968 to visit their estranged mother. Their mother is a poet and activist affiliated with the Black Panther Party, a political organization that was formed to protect African Americans from police actions that targeted their communities. The Coretta Scott King Awards annually honor African American authors and illustrators of outstanding books that portray the Black experience for young readers. Williams-Garcia also won Coretta Scott King awards for the other two novels in the series. She received the award in 2014 for P.S. Be Eleven (2013), in which the three sisters return home and struggle to readjust to their life in Brooklyn; and in 2016 for Gone Crazy in Alabama (2015), in which the girls visit their grandmother in the rural Southern United States.
Williams was born on April 13, 1957, in Queens, a borough of New York City. She moved with her family to the states of Arizona, California, and Georgia before returning to Queens. In 1980, she graduated from Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, with a bachelor’s degree in liberal arts. Williams married Peter Garcia in the early 1980’s. They later divorced. Her first novel, Blue Tights, was published in 1988. It tells the story of a young African American girl who loves to dance but is told by her instructor that her full-figured body shape is not suited to ballet.
Williams-Garcia’s other books include Fast Talk on a Slow Track (1991), Like Sisters on the Homefront (1995), the picture book Catching the Wild Waiyuuzee (illustrated by Mike Reed, 2000), Every Time a Rainbow Dies (2001), No Laughter Here (2003), Jumped (2009), and Clayton Byrd Goes Underground (2017). She taught writing at the Vermont College of Fine Arts from 2005 to 2015.
