Career
Prior to becoming a full-time writer, Winston was a lifestyle columnist with the Sun Sentinel. She published her first book, Acting, in 2004. The book is a young adult novel about an aspiring teen actor whose family life is upturned when her twin sister becomes pregnant.
In 2010, Winston published the novel President of the Whole Fifth Grade, which follows Brianna Justice, a girl competing to become the president of her fifth grade class. It was followed by President of the Whole Sixth Grade and President of the Whole Sixth Grade: Girl Code in 2015 and 2019 respectively.
In 2022, she wrote another middle grade novel, Lotus Bloom and the Afro Revolution, which won a BCALA Literary Award and was longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award for Young People's Literature. The book, which took inspiration from a real-life event Winston watched on the news, has the titular protagonist stand up against her school's administration after they threaten to suspend her by claiming her afro violates their dress code when she her tries to report a boy for bullying her.
In 2024, Winston released Shark Teeth, which follows Sharkita, a twelve-year-old girl with a neglectful mother who struggles with anxiety and caring for her younger siblings. The book won the Walter Dean Myers Award for Young Readers in 2025, and was also shortlisted for the Kirkus Prize for Young Reader's Literature and the Schneider Family Book Award for Middle Grade Books.
Winston's other novels include The Braid Girls, where two friends attempting to start a braiding business deal with one’s previously unknown half-sister coming to live with them, The Sweetest Sound, about a ten-year-old aspiring singer with severe anxiety, and Destiny of the Diamond Princess, where an adopted girl learns her biological family is the royalty of the fictional nation of Maliwanda. She both wrote and illustrated 2019's Jada Sly, Artist and Spy, which has the eponymous ten-year-old spy attempt to solve the mysteries surrounding her mother's alleged death.
