Brian Watson (@iambrianwatson on Twitter and Instagram) is an award-winning queer and genderqueer writer. Their latest prize was for the memoir genre for the Pacific Northwest Writers Association’s 2025 Unpublished Book Contest. Their essays on queerness and Japan have been published in The Audacity’s Emerging Writer series, The Queer Love Project, and TriQuarterly, among other places, and their craft essays appear in Brevity Blog. An excerpt from CRYING IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE was chosen by Stone Canoe for their 2025 issue. They were named a finalist in the 2024 Iron Horse Literary Review long-form essay contest and won an honorable mention in the 2024 Writer’s Digest Annual Writing Competition. Brian shares OUT OF JAPAN, their Substack newsletter with more than 600 subscribers, and reviews non-fiction for Hippocampus. In 2011, their translation of MIDNIGHT ENCOUNTERS, a Japanese short story by Tei’ichi Hirai, was nominated for a Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Award.
