The work
People, places, and traditions of the Deep South.
- Awards
- E.B. White Read-Aloud Award, 2007
Parents’ Choice Gold Award, 2006 - Listed
- TIME Magazine’s 100 Best Young Adult Books of All Time
- Translated
- Eight languages
Alabama Moon
Ten-year-old Moon has lived his whole life in the forest with his father. When his father dies, the world he was raised to avoid takes him in.
Dirt Road Home
Hal Mitchell is sentenced to a boys’ home that runs like a jail. He can walk out in a few months — if the gangs let him keep his head down.
Fourmile
A boy on an Alabama farm sizes up two dangerous men: the one courting his widowed mother, and the drifter who turns up to work. Wound tight as a western.
Terror at Bottle Creek
A river guide’s son is left alone on the delta when a category-three hurricane comes up the bay — with two girls to keep alive and a tree to hold on to.
Hideout
Sam finds a boy living alone in an abandoned cabin deep in the swamp, and starts telling the kind of small lies that get large.
Deep Water
Twelve-year-old Julie takes over her father’s dive charter off the Alabama coast. She surfaces to find the boat gone and two clients in trouble.
Beast
Adam says he can’t remember the two months he went missing in a Florida swamp. That isn’t true. He remembers exactly what stood in the road.
Cottonlandia
A Manhattan prep-school kid is sent to his grandmother’s Mississippi cotton farm for a four-day break, and learns he isn’t going home.
Among the Swamp People
Twenty years in the Mobile-Tensaw Delta: a cabin built from driftwood, and the community out there — generous and violent, gracious and paranoid by turns.
Bay Boy
Growing up in Point Clear when it was still a working bay town: Mardi Gras, jubilees, shrimping, hurricanes, and a ghost on Zundel’s Wharf.
For schools & teachers
Books made to be discussed.
Watt’s novels are widely used in elementary and middle-grade curricula. Teacher guides, discussion questions, and classroom resources are free to download and adapt.