Brad Watson, author and creative writing professor at the University of Wyoming, died July 8 at age 64. He was born and raised in Mississippi, where he married his high school sweetheart and had a son prior to senior year. Watson briefly pursued acting in Los Angeles before his brother was killed in a car crash, which brought him back to Mississippi and into higher education. He worked for the University of Alabama after earning an MFA there. Waton's debut, Last Days of the Dog-Men (1996), a short story collection that took him a decade to write, won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and the Great Lakes New Writers Award. He then taught in Massachusetts, Florida and California before settling in Wyoming. His first novel, The Heaven of Mercury (2002), was a National Book Award Finalist. Watson's second story collection, Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives (2010), was a finalist for the 2011 PEN/Faulkner Award.
Miss Jane: A Novel (2016) is based on the true story of Watson's great-aunt, who was born with a genital birth defect that caused incontinence and made sex impossible. It was long-listed for the 2016 National Book Award in Fiction. Watson is considered a Southern writer, though he bristled at Southern stereotypes rampant in the rest of the U.S. In a 2016 Salon piece, he said, "I was at a tea party or the like at a famous university in the early stages of researching Miss Jane, and I asked the host--who was a pediatrician, for goodness sake--if he could speculate on what might have been my great aunt's condition. His response was, 'You're from Mississippi, right? Is there any history of incest in your family?'" Miss Jane is available in paperback from W.W. Norton ($15.95). --Tobias Mutter
