Wayetu Moore Books in Order

If you want the book most readers start with: She Would Be King
If you want the personal story behind her themes of home and survival: The Dragons, the Giant, the Women
If you're reading with children and want everyday Liberian life: J is for Jollof Rice → 1 Peking → A Gift for Yole
If you want gentle read-alouds with pride, comfort, and folktale energy: My Little Musu → I Love Liberia → Kukujumuku → Jamonghoie

Wayetu Moore was born in Liberia and raised largely in Texas, but that plain version skips the upheaval that shaped her life and work. When she was five, her family fled Monrovia during the First Liberian Civil War. They were later reunited with her mother, who had been studying in New York, and the family moved through several places before settling in Texas. Questions of home, memory, and return have been with her ever since.

She has described those early memories as both idyllic and traumatic. In The Dragons, the Giant, the Women, her father and grandmother try to shield the children from war by turning fear into story, a survival instinct that says a lot about the way Moore writes now. Even in difficult material, she pays close attention to what families invent, hide, and carry with them.

That mix of history and imagination became her lane.

Moore first headed toward the arts through theater, studying for a time at New York University before transferring to Howard University, where she earned a degree in journalism. At Howard, writing moved from interest to commitment. She later studied writing at the University of Southern California and anthropology and education at Columbia University, a combination that fits her work well, part story, part research, part attention to how people learn.

Before She Would Be King reached a wide audience, she was already building books from the ground up. In 2011, she founded One Moore Book with her siblings, creating children's books for young readers whose daily lives and cultures were often missing from the shelves. Books like J is for Jollof Rice, I Love Liberia, My Little Musu, and A Gift for Yole center Liberian places, food, language, and family life in a way children can recognize right away.

She Would Be King, her debut novel, brought her to a much wider readership. The book reimagines Liberia's founding through three characters with unusual gifts, Gbessa, June Dey, and Norman Aragon. Readers who connect with it often like the way Moore holds history and myth together without smoothing out the violence underneath. The novel is interested in slavery, colonial power, black migration, and the hard question of who gets to belong in a new nation.

Then came The Dragons, the Giant, the Women, a memoir that returns to her own childhood escape from war and the years that followed in the United States. It tracks not just survival, but also the confusing work of becoming American, staying Liberian, and trying to understand both at once. The book was named a New York Times Notable Book in 2020, and Moore later won the William Saroyan Prize for Nonfiction.

She writes like someone who knows that history is personal.

Across her books, certain things keep returning: women who carry families through disaster, children learning how to name the world around them, and people split between countries but still tied to each one. Liberia is central, not just as a setting but as a refusal of erasure. Moore lives in New York and stays closely connected to Liberia through her writing and literacy work, which makes her bibliography feel joined up even when she moves from picture books to memoir to magical realism.