Watt Key

Albert Watkins Key, Jr., publishing under the name Watt Key, is an award-winning southern fiction author. While enjoyed by all ages, his novels are widely used in elementary and middle grade classrooms for their success with young reluctant male readers. His debut novel, Alabama Moon, was published to international acclaim in 2006. Alabama Moon won the 2007 E.B. White Read-Aloud Award and the 2006 Parents’ Choice Gold Award. It is listed on the “100 Best Young Adult Books of All Time” list by Time magazine and has been translated into eight languages. The companion novel, Dirt Road Home, was published in 2010 to similar praise. Key’s third novel, Fourmile, was released in 2012 and earned starred reviews from Kirkus, School Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, and more. Terror at Bottle Creek, was published in 2016 to rave reviews from critics, including Booklist, which called it “Hatchet for the post-Katrina generation,” and it won the Alabama Library Association’s 2017 award for Juvenile Fiction. Watt’s latest novel, Deep Water, is published by Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers (2018).  Deep Water has been called “an epic tale of grueling odds” by Booklist, and Publishers Weekly has praised it for having “plenty of nail-biting suspense.”