People like Brad Watson

Brad Watson is an American author. Originally from Mississippi, he has worked and lived in Alabama, Florida, California, and Boston, and now lives in Wyoming where he is a professor at the University of Wyoming. Watson has published four books—two novels and two collections of short stories—to critical acclaim.

Watson was born on born July 24, 1955 in Meridian, Mississippi. After briefly trying his luck in Hollywood, he attended Meridian Junior College and then Mississippi State University, graduating in 1978 with a degree in English, and the University of Alabama, where he obtained an MFA in writing and American literature. After working as a newspaper reporter and editor and at an advertising agency, in 1988 he returned to the University of Alabama to teach creative writing; he also worked for the university's public relations department. While at Alabama he published Last Days of the Dog-Men (1996), which had taken him ten years to write and won him the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and The Great Lakes New Writers Award. Amy Grace Lloyd, writing for the New York Times twenty years later, called it "a near-perfect story collection". In 1997 he moved to Harvard University and lived in Boston until 2002. He was a writer in residence at the University of West Florida, the University of Alabama, the University of Mississippi, and the University of California, Irvine. Since 2005 he has taught at the University of Wyoming, where he is a professor of creative writing and literature in the Department of Visual & Literary Arts.