P. L. Watts

P. L. Watts escaped the Florida foster care system and worked her way through college and graduate school. She earned an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a Lambda Literary Fellowship for Emerging LGBTQ Writers. She writes gothic fiction and creative nonfiction about place, poverty, and connection. Her creative nonfiction has been runner up or shortlisted for Ruminate Magazine’s Vandermey Nonfiction contest, Winning Writer’s Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest, The Speculative Literature Foundation’s Working Class Grant, the First Pages Prize, and the DisQuiet Prize. Her essays have appeared in ANMLY, New Letters, The Florida Review, J Journal, The Nonbinary Review, and elsewhere. Her first novella, The Bonny Swans, came out in 2023 from Cemetery Gates Media as part of Mother Horror’s My Dark Library series. She is currently mentoring an incarcerated writer in PEN America’s Prison Writer’s Program and working on a memoir called Ghost Story from a haunted garret in Spokane, WA.