Brad Watson

Brad Watson was born in Meridian, MS, received his BA in English from Mississippi State University and received his MFA from the University of Alabama in 1985. He has worked as a journalist, a teacher, and a writer, and has published short fiction in Story, Black Warrior Review, Greensboro Review, and Dog Stories.

After several years of working as a reporter for a string of Gulf Coast newspapers, during which he wrote no fiction, in 1988 Watson joined the faculty of the English Department at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, where he taught creative writing, freshman composition, and American literature. He also resumed writing fiction, turning to several earlier failed attempts at short stories in which dogs play key roles.

His first book-length work, Last Days of the Dog Men, is a collection of short stories about the relationships between people and dogs, published by W.W. Norton in 1996. In The Hungry Mind Review, E.J. Levy comments that Watson “captures well the cadence of the rural south and evokes the fragility of a way of life disappearing under the pressures of urbanization and shifting social norms... When these stories work, as many do, it is because the lives of men and dogs resonate and one is made aware of the inchoate pain and violence both species endure.” The book has won two awards, the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award.

Watson and his family left the University of Alabama to move to Boston, where he taught at Harvard. His first novel, The Heaven of Mercury, was published in the 2002. He now lives and teaches in Pensacola, Florida.