Emma Cairns Watson (she/her) is a fiction writer from California and graduate of the MFA at UC Irvine, where she won the 2024 Henfield Prize. A finalist for the Sewanee Review Fiction Contest, STORY Foundation Prize, BOMB Fiction Contest, and Iowa Review Award in Fiction several years running, her work has received support from the Olympic Valley Community of Writers and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and appeared in journals including BOMB, Fairy Tale Review, The Greensboro Review, EPOCH, and One Story.

She’s at work on a collection and a first novel.