SATA

PERSONAL

Born October 28, 1970, in Point Clear, AL; married; wife’s name Katie; children: three.

Birmingham-Southern College, B.A.

ADDRESS

• Home - Mobile, AL.
• Agent - Lisa Vance, Aaron Priest Literary Agency, 708 Third Ave., 23rd Fl., New York, NY 10017; levance@aaronpriest.com.

CAREER

Writer. Worked as a computer programmer in Mobile, AL, and founded a software company.

Parents’ Choice Award, 2006, and E.B. White Read-Aloud Award for Older Readers, 2007, Alabama Library Association Award and Best Books for Young Adults designation, American Library Association, both 2008, all for Alabama Moon; Alabama Library Association Award, 2012, for Dirt Road Home; Best Children’s Book of the Year list, Bank Street College of Education, 2013, for Fourmile; Alabama Library Association Award, 2017, for Terror at Battle Creek. Numerous additional honors from state reading associations.

WRITINGS

• YOUNG-ADULT NOVELS
• Alabama Moon, Farrar Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 2006
• Dirt Road Home, Farrar Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 2010
• Fourmile, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 2012
• Terror at Bottle Creek, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 2016
• Hideout, Farrar Straus Giroux (New York, NY), 2017
• Deep Water, Farrar Straus Giroux (New York, NY), 2018
• Beast: Face-to-Face with the Florida Bigfoot , Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux Books for Young Readers (New York, NY), 2020
• SCREENPLAYS
• (As Albert Watkins Key, Jr.; with James Whittaker) Alabama Moon, based on Key’s novel of the same name, Faulkner-McLean Entertainment, 2009
• Alabama Dirt, Freestyle Digital Media, 2017
• OTHER
• Bay Boy: Stories of a Childhood in Point Clear, Alabama (memoir), illustrated by Murray Key , University of Alabama Press (Tuscaloosa, AL), 2019

Alabama Moon was adapted for film, Faulkner-McLean Entertainment, 2009.

SIDELIGHTS

Watt Key writes novels for teen readers that delve deep into the culture of rural Alabama and other parts of the southern United States. His debut novel, Alabama Moon, was influenced by his experiences growing up hunting and fishing in the woodlands around Point Clear, Alabama. Watt’s young protagonists struggle with family and economic pressures—and sometimes natural disasters—in works such as Terror at Bottle Creek, Hideout, and Beast: Face-to-Face with the Florida Bigfoot.

Key’s home state is the setting of Alabama Moon, in which he focuses on the ten-year-old son of a survivalist killed while eluding law-enforcement authorities. Having been trained by his father to survive in the woods, Moon now lives alone, distrustful of the government. He wants to travel to Alaska, a place his father believed that allowed people the chance to still live off the land. That plan ends when Moon is discovered and sent to live in the Pinson Boys’ Home. Here he makes the first friends of his life. Banding together with his fellow outliers, he leads an escape and helps establish a fugitive home in the woods. When his best friend Kit falls ill and no herbal remedies can cure him, the boy begins to question his dead father’s wisdom.

Key’s debut won praise from reviewers, Booklist contributor John Green calling Alabama Moon an “excellent novel of survival and adventure.” Green went on to note that “Moon’s narration is thoroughly believable” in this “perfectly paced” adventure story, and School Library Journal critic Nancy P. Reeder described Key’s novel as “well written with a flowing style, plenty of dialogue, and lots of action.” In Horn Book Vicky Smith termed it a “winningly fresh and sympathetic look at a life and culture almost never seen in children’s books,” while Tanya Lee Stone wrote in the New York Times Book Review that Alabama Moon is an “unusual coming-of-age story” with a “rich cast of supporting characters.”

Fourteen-year-old Hal, a friend of Moon’s from Alabama Moon, returns in Key’s young-adult novel Dirt Road Home. Hal finds himself in Hellenweiler, a home for at-risk youth, after his and Moon’s escape from the Pinson Boys’ Home. Hal is determined to stay out of trouble in Hellenweiler so that he can return to his family and his girlfriend. The challenges are formidable, however: Hellenweiler is a perilous juvenile-detention facility with a corrupt cadre of guards and two embattled internal gangs that vie for the allegiance of newcomers.

A Publishers Weekly contributor noted that Dirt Road Home “offers a disturbing appraisal of life in a juvenile facility, and a riveting battle for justice,” while a Kirkus Reviews writers praised Key’s second book as both “suspenseful and harrowing.” In School Library Journal Amy Cheney asserted that, at the fictional Hellenweiler, “the tension, positioning, threats, and shifting alliances among the boys are believable and will hook readers.” Writing in Booklist, Ian Chipman lauded Key’s characterization of the beleaguered Hal, whose “efforts to contain his rage and navigate brawls keep the atmosphere tense and pacing fleet.” As Victoria Vogel declared in her Voice of Youth Advocates critique of Dirt Road Home, “Key does a fabulous job of keeping his readers involved in the story and vested in the characters.”

Another Alabama teenager is beset by circumstances in Fourmile. Young teenager Foster is still grieving over the loss of his father a year ago. Foster’s mother is unable to manage the family farm by herself and she falls prey to Dax, a violent ruffian whom the boy quickly comes to loathe. Less alarming to either Foster or his beloved dog Joe is the mysterious vagrant who turns up at the edge of the property and offers to do off jobs in exchange for a barn berth.

“Key masterfully unveils secrets, leading up to an explosive climax that tests the courage of everyone involved,” wrote a Publishers Weekly writer. A Kirkus Reviews book critic hailed Fourmile as “another powerful, riveting coming-of-age tale that doesn’t stint on violence,” adding that “Foster’s first-person voice is richly authentic.” “Simultaneously poignant and suspenseful, the story will keep readers on the edge of their seats,” Ragan O’Mall predicted in her School Library Journal appraisal of Keys’s novel.

Key deftly charts the course of an external threat in Terror at Bottle Creek. Family issues force Cort to grapple with extraordinary responsibilities ahead of his years: because his father is still unable to deal with the end of his marriage, the teenager is home alone when a hurricane tracks toward their houseboat in coastal Alabama. Fortunately, Cort is a veteran of previous storms and he handles the preparations with assuredness; he also knows the land well because he helps his dad run a bayou-hunting guide business. As the hurricane nears, he asks a neighbor to help locate his missing father; when she leaves and he is stranded with the woman’s young daughters Liza and Francie, Cort must protect them from the rising flood waters.

“It has a page-turning urgency, complete with alligators, wild boars, and poisonous snakes,” forewarned Voice of Youth Advocates critic Jane Murphy about Terror at Bottle Creek, while Booklist writer Maggie Reagan affirmed that “Key’s descriptions of the storm and the swamp are arresting and harrowing.” Writing for School Library Journal, Vicki Reutter described Terror at Bottle Creek as “a page-turner that will have readers watching where they step and looking up into trees, long after the slithering and snorting end.”

In Hideout, a thriller set in the bayous of Mississippi, readers meet thirteen-year-old Sam Ford, the son of the new police chief in the coastal city of Pascagoula. After suffering a humiliating beating at the hands of some school bullies, Sam resolves to prove his worth by locating a dead body that search-and-rescue teams failed to recover. While exploring the swamplands near his home, Sam encounters a youngster named Davey who claims to be repairing an abandoned fishing cabin that he will share with family members. Skeptical of Davey’s tale, Sam nonetheless comes to the boy’s aid, providing him with much needed supplies, but he also becomes entangled with Davey’s malevolent older brother, Slade, a thief and drug dealer.

Critiquing Hideout in Booklist, Krista Hutley remarked that Sam and Davey’s “survivalist adventures in the swamps are suspenseful, and the reassuring ending relies on supportive adult intervention.” Watt offers “a compelling read that will keep a tween audience burning the flashlight batteries late into the night,” in the opinion of Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books critic Elizabeth Bush. “It’s man versus nature as well as man versus man in this tale that will have strong appeal to Key’s fans and adventure lovers,” opined a writer in Kirkus Reviews.

Deep Water is based on an event from the author’s life, when he found himself stranded while scuba diving in the Gulf of Mexico. Watt’s novel centers on Julie Sims, a twelve year old who spends her summers helping her father run his dive shop. When her dad falls ill on a trip off the Alabama coast, Julie must take the clients—wealthy businessman Hank Jordan and his reckless son Shane—into the water. On the dive, Hank and Shane endanger their safety by ignoring Julie’s instructions, and when the trio surface they discover the boat has vanished, leaving them vulnerable to hypothermia, dehydration, and shark attacks.

In School Library Journal, Kaetlyn Phillips called Deep Water an “action-packed survival story” that “will entice and entertain” readers. A Publishers Weekly critic applauded the work, noting that Watt “meticulously details the steps that quick-thinking Julie takes to stay alive,” and Jennifer Staller in Voice of Youth Advocates predicted that audiences would be “engaged with Julie’s fight to keep herself and her clients alive and will be eager to learn their fates.”

[NEW PROSE]

In Beast, Key “deftly crafts a riveting story,” according to Booklist reviewer Stephanie Cohen. While returning from a trip to Disney World, thirteen-year-old Adam Parks survives an accident that plunged his family’s car into the Suwannee River; his parents have gone missing. Recounting the episode to a state trooper, Adam claims that his father swerved to avoid a large, hairy, bipedal animal. When newspaper reports refer to the creature as a Sasquatch, the teen grows determined to learn as much as he can about the cryptid. Hoping to learn the truth about what happened the night his parents disappeared, Adam boldly ventures into the swamp where he befriends Travis Stanley, an eccentric recluse who has a history with the mysterious creatures.

Beast was inspired in part by an unsettling incident involving Key, who believes he may have come in contact with a Sasquatch while hunting on his family’s farm in the Mississippi Delta. “Walking a fine line between the fantastic and the realistic, Key creates a scary, page-turning adventure,” remarked a contributor in Kirkus Reviews, and Stephanie Wilkes, writing in School Library Journal, believed that the novel would hold appeal for a “reluctant reader seeking an outdoors adventure or to someone who loves survivalist fiction.”

[END NEW PROSE]

Watt hopes that his literary efforts help readers expand their boundaries. As he stated on his website, “At a time when many kids wall their imaginations in the narrow world of screen-watching and video-gaming, I hope reading my novels help broaden their experiences and break down those walls. I try to put my characters in realistic, life-threatening situations that force them to learn that they can be confident and brave, moral and compassionate, and solve real-world problems.”

BIOCRIT

PERIODICALS

• Booklist, November 1, 2006, John Green, review of Alabama Moon, p. 52; June 1, 2010, Ian Chipman, review of Dirt Road Home, p. 50; December 15, 2015, Maggie Reagan, review of Terror at Bottle Creek, p. 56; January 1, 2017, Krista Hutley, review of Hideout, p. 93; March 15, 2020, Stephanie Cohen, review of Beast: Face-to-Face with the Florida Bigfoot, p. 62.

• Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, October, 2012, Karen Coats, review of Fourmile, p. 92; January, 2016, April Spisak, review of Terror at Bottle Creek, p. 257; January, 2017, Elizabeth Bush, review of Hideout, p. 220.

• Horn Book, October-November, 2006, Vicky Smith, review of Alabama Moon, p. 589; September-October, 2010, Jonathan Hunt, review of Dirt Road Home, p. 80; November-December, 2012, Dean Schneider, review of Fourmile, p. 93.

• Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 2006, review of Alabama Moon, p. 845; June 15, 2010, review of Dirt Road Home; August 1, 2012, review of Fourmile; October 15, 2015, review of Terror at Bottle Creek; November 1, 2016, review of Hideout; March 1, 2018, review of Deep Water; February 1, 2020, review of Beast.

• Kliatt, September, 2006, Myrna Marler, review of Alabama Moon, p. 14.

• New York Times Book Review, February 11, 2007, Tanya Lee Stone, review of Alabama Moon.

• Publishers Weekly, October 2, 2006, review of Alabama Moon, p. 63; June 21, 2010, review of Dirt Road Home, p. 48; August 13, 2012, review of Fourmile, p. 69; October 12, 2015, review of Terror at Bottle Creek, p. 70; January 29, 2018, review of Deep Water, p. 188.

• School Library Journal, September, 2006, Nancy P. Reeder, review of Alabama Moon, p. 209; November, 2010, Amy Cheney, review of Dirt Road Home, p. 118; November, 2012, Ragan O’Malley, review of Fourmile, p. 109; November, 2015, Vicki Reutter, review of Terror at Bottle Creek, p. 96; January, 2017, Patrick Tierney, review of Hideout, p. 93; April, 2018, Kaetlyn Phillips, review of Deep Water, p. 118; April, 2020, Stephanie Wilkes, review of Beast, p. 130.

• Voice of Youth Advocates, December, 2010, Victoria Vogel, review of Dirt Road Home, p. 455; February, 2016, Jane Murphy, review of Terror at Bottle Creek, p. 59; June, 2018, Jennifer Staller, review of Deep Water, p. 58.

ONLINE

• AL.com, https://www.al.com/ (July 8, 2014) Kelsey Stein. “Alabama Moon Author Watt Key Talks about Writing through Rejection, Becoming Screenwriter ‘By Mistake.’”

• Decatur Daily Online, http://www.decaturdaily.com/ (July 30, 2006), Dawn McNutt, review of Alabama Moon.

• Watt Key website, https://wattkey.com (July 1, 2020).