Carl Watson is a poet, fiction writer, playwright and essayist. He grew up in "the Region" of Northwest Indiana and has lived in Portland, Oregon, New Orleans, Chicago, New York and Paris. His works of fiction include the trilogy of novels (Only Descend, Idylls of Complicity, Backwards the Drowned Go Dreaming), as well as Hotel of Irrevocable Acts, Beneath the Empire of the Birds, and Bricolage Ex Machina. His fiction has been translated and published in France by Gallimard and Editions Vagabonde. Poetry collections include After Thought, Stage Fright, Pareidolia, Astral Botanica and Anarcadium Pan. His work has appeared in various journals, including The Village Voice, NY Press, The Williamsburg Observer, Sensitive Skin, The Brooklyn Rail, Evergreen Review, Degraphe, Liberation and others. He received the Kathy Acker Award for Fiction in 2012. Watson wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on the autobiography of the outsider artist, Henry Darger and he taught literature for 10 years in the CUNY system. When the weather's cold he lives on the Lower East Side of NYC. When the weather's warm, he lives in a barn in Fleischmanns, NY, where he makes sculptures out of rusted farm implements, scrap metal and fallen tree trunks.