Miles Girard Watson

Miles Girard Watson was born in Chicago, the son of prominent journalist Jerome Richard Watson and Northwestern University teacher Jerilyn Watson. He graduated from Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland in 1990, and attended York College of Pennsylvania, where he joined Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity and obtained undergraduate degrees in Criminal Justice and History. He worked in law enforcement from 1997 - 2004 and received a number of awards in that field, and has periodically worked in private investigation. He has two graduate degrees in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University and his work has been published in Green's, Eye Contact, The Ring and K.O. Magazine; during the 1990s he also placed in the Reynolds Price, Kinesis, and E.L. Doctorow International Fiction Contests. In 2012 he was awarded Seton Hill's first-ever Writing Popular Fiction Endowed Scholarship Award. He moved to Los Angeles in 2007 and has worked in the entertainment industry a make-up effects artist, actor, writer, and production coordinator. Since 2011 he has also worked extensively in the video game industry. He obtained a black belt in White Tiger Taekwondo in 2012 and trains at the UFC Gym in Santa Clarita. He has been a member of American Cinemateque since 2015 and of the Internation Make Up Artists Trade Show since 2018. Watson is an accomplished author. His first novel, "Cage Life," was released on February 14, 2016 by One Nine Books; on March 19, 2017 it was named "Book of the Year" by Zealot Script Magazine, and on December 11, 2018, won the Best Indie Book Award in the category of Mystery & Suspense. He has subsequently released a sequel, "Knuckle Down, which was given Honorable Mention in the 27th Annual Writer's Digest Awards for Genre Fiction on October 30, 2019, and won the Best Indie Book Award in the Suspense Category on December 29, 2019. On May 6, 2019, his short story collection "Devils You Know" was named a Finalist in the Eric Hoffer Awards for Excellence in Independent Publishing, and on December 24, his story "The Numbers Game" won the Pinnacle Book Achievement Award in the Novella category. His novella "Nosferatui" also won the Pinnacle Award. In the fall of 2019, he released his third novel, "Sinner's Cross," which has won the Best Indie Book Award for Historical Fiction, the Book Excellence Award for Action, and the Literary Titan Gold Medal.