Cliff Watson (he/him) graduated from the Master of Fine Arts in creative writing and poetics program at the University of Washington Bothell, where he was co-curator and host of the Gamut Literary Series. His hybrid-form thesis, 6-foot pine: life and romance in the chrondemic age, explores crossing personal, cultural, technological, and fantastical boundaries in a pandemic and climate change afflicted world. Inspired by this experience, Cliff is currently a PhD student in communication and rhetoric at RPI diving into topics related to hybridity and narrative. He holds a Bachelor of Science from Brown University and a Master of Science from UW Seattle in applied mathematics. Cliff writes prose, scripts, poetry, and lyrics, and creates hybrid experiments with digital media, coding, and live performance. He has performed over 30 roles as a singer-actor in opera, musical theatre, and other genres. In 2017, his spoken-word piece, Dialogue about croquet in a library, set to music by Lili Kung, was performed by acrobats in a handstand circus act in Acro-biographies. In 2019, Cliff explored song, screenplay, cartoon, and haibun, in his chapbook, Transformation. His poetics paper and technological autobiography, Airtime, exploring an artistic methodology to resist the medical-industrial complex and reclaim the self, was published in the 2020 edition of journal The Crow. Several pieces, including found poetry, haibun, script-memorial, lyric essay, and augmented reality video art, have been published in Clamor magazine and Nokturno.fi. Currently a teaching assistant in human-computer interaction, Cliff was a program manager, test engineer, and software engineer for over twenty years. He has also been an opera soloist, professional chorister, musical theatre actor, olde-tyme commercial reenactor, circus set builder, digital-flow editor, and an Assistant Career Advisor in UW Bothell’s Career Services department. Cliff has lived in Washington State, Hong Kong, and now upstate New York.

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