Louise Meriwether is an American novelist, essayist, journalist, and activist. In 1970, she published her first and critically acclaimed book, Daddy Was a Number Runner (with an introduction by James Baldwin), using autobiographical elements about growing up in Harlem during the Depression and in the era after the Harlem Renaissance. She has since written short stories that have appeared in Antioch Review and Negro Digest, as well as biographies for children about historically important African Americans, including Robert Smalls, Daniel Hale Williams, and Rosa Parks. Meriwether has also taught creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Houston.

Louise Meriwether has told everyone who can read or feel what it means to be a black man or woman in this country . . . A considerable achievement