Excerpt from Watch Us Rise by Renee Watson, Ellen Hagen, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"I've been ready since seven thirty," Mia brags, swinging into my room. Of course she's been ready for hours. Mia wakes up ready. She's a senior. We're only a year apart, so we're practically required to be close, but since we're so different, we get along pretty well. Mia is just confident. She's the captain of the varsity basketball team and wears her hair cropped short. "You look good, Chels— very feminist- y."

"You both look great just the way you are, and you're both going to be very late to school if you don't pull it together," my mom says, peeking her head in. "Could you please be on time for your first day?"

"Yes, yes, we're on it." I say.

"And remember," Mom finishes, "it's what's on the inside that matters. But you two also look very good on the outside. Now get moving, and try not to focus so much on how you look," she says, walking out.

I grab my book bag and journal, and one of my poems falls out.

Mia grabs it. "This new?" she asks, starting to read.

"Kinda new. I started it over the summer. Figured it would be a good reminder for the year."

Mia reads it out loud.


Advice to Myself
from Chelsea to Chelsea

Be reckless when it matters most.

Messy incomplete. Belly laugh. Love language. Be butterfly stroke in a pool of freestylers.

Fast & loose.

You don't need all the right moves all the time. You just need limbs wild. Be equator. Lava. Ocean floor, the neon of plankton. Be unexpected. The rope they lower to save the other bodies.

Be your whole body. Every hiccup & out of place. Elastic girl. Be stretch moldable.

Be funk flexible. Free fashionable. Go on.

Be hair natural. Try & do anything, woman. What brave acts like on your hips.

Be cocky at school. Have a fresh mouth.

Don't let them tell you what's prim & proper.

Not your ladylike. Don't be their ladylike.

Their dress- up girl. Not their pretty.

Don't be their bottled. Saturated. Dyed. Squeezed. SPANXed. Be gilded. Gold. Papyrus.

A parakeet's balk & flaunt. Show up uninvited.

Know what naked feels like.

Get the sweetness. Be the woman you love.

Be tight rope & expanse. Stay hungry.

Be a mouth that needs to get fed. Ask for it.

Stay alert— lively— alive & unfettered.

Full on it all. Say yes when it matters.

Be dragonfish. Set all the fires.

Be all the woman they warned you against being.

Be her anyway.

Excerpted from Watch Us Rise by Renee Watson. Copyright © 2019 by Renee Watson. Excerpted by permission of Bloomsbury USA. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.