Visiting Writers Series Presents Award-Winning Author Brad Watson, March 25

By Purnell T. Cropper | March 22, 2011

Arcadia University’s Visiting Writers Series welcomes award-winning author Brad Watson, on Friday, March 25, at 7:30 p.m. in Grey Towers Castle. The event is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served at 7 p.m. in advance of Watson’s reading, and his books will be on sale for him to sign afterward.

Watson’s major works include Last Days of the Dog-Men, a collection of short stories (1996 W.W. Norton), which won a Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His first novel, The Heaven of Mercury, was published in 2002 by W.W. Norton. In 2010, a novella and stories titled Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives was published by W.W. Norton.

His writing career began while he was enrolled at Meridian Junior College, in Meridian, Mississippi. Although he had no previous writing experience, Watson scored high on the English entrance exam, and was placed in an Honors English Class. This was the turning point in his life.

In 1976, he made the decision to further his education and enrolled at Mississippi State University as an English major. That first summer at Mississippi State, he wrote his first short story. After graduating in 1978, he went on to pursue a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing at the University Alabama.