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Cheri Renee Watkins - John Robert Kley

Cheri Renée cut her publishing teeth in Las Vegas as an assistant editor and entertainment writer at Showbiz Weekly magazine. She has interviewed such entertainers as magician David Copperfield, comedian Rita Rudner, choreographers for the Radio City Rockettes, and the founders of Blue Man Group.

First moving to Las Vegas at the age of four, Cheri Renée has witnessed the transformation of America’s Adult Playground from small desert getaway for high-rollers and bargain travelers, to an international destination with world class shopping, dining, and entertainment – and a bevy of rapid growth problems.

Cheri Renée has inked Las Vegas shopping guides, artist profiles, and feature stories for Las Vegas Life Home & Design (H&D). She has covered the Las Vegas Arts District for Las Vegas Life Home & Design and 944 magazines. She has written travel, spa and human interest articles for the What’s On Guides based in Las Vegas, Henderson, and Summerlin, Nevada. And she penned a chapter about Las Vegas weddings for Time Out: Las Vegas travel guide published by Penguin books, London.

Besides the arts, Cheri’s other great love is holistic health and science. She enjoys the topic so much that she briefly returned to college and took a series of pre-medical courses, while considering the professional option of “physician and writer.”

A semester as an autopsy assistant at the Clark County Medical Examiner changed her mind about medicine, but the two years she took to study biomedical coursework also helped her find another niche: Academic research editing. She has copyedited and prepared biological and medical research for journal publication for faculty in the Biological Sciences Department at UNLV and the Sunrise Children’s Heart Center at Sunrise Hospital in Las Vegas.

During this professional “detour focused on service” Cheri began working more extensively in the non-profit sector. She wrote and photographed for a non-profit teen news publication called “Class!” magazine. Eventually, she went on to do fundraising for the organization, as co-chair of the silent auction committee.

Cheri Renée has worked in a domestic violence shelter, and researched extensively the topics of violence, nonviolence, and their effects on families, women and children. She has taught high school English in the South Bronx as a New York City Teaching Fellow. Through a combination of grant writing and events planning, she has raised nearly $100,000 for different charitable organizations.

Cheri Renée currently consults as an English Language Arts Content Editor for a major educational publishing house. She also recently worked on state-level political campaign in California, which she enjoyed a great deal.

Cheri Renée graduated magna cum laude from Augusta State University in 1998 with a Bachelor of Arts in English, Creative Writing emphasis, and minors in Telecommunications and Theater.

When not writing or editing, she works on other people's film and theater projects, while trying to fund her own film and theatre projects. She has worked in countless capacities on dozens of film, stage, and television productions in Las Vegas, New York, London, Los Angeles, and Augusta. She is currently developing her first documentary.

Cheri Renée has visited 9 countries and 27 of the United States and is actively working her way to see all 50. Although she has roots in Las Vegas, Nevada and Augusta, Georgia, where she was born, she considers herself something of a nomad.