Colin Watts was born in Staines to the sound of doodlebugs overshooting London. He trained as a town planner, but turned to community development and training in the early 1970's and adult education thereafter. Thereafter, he stepped from one ladder to the next, from economic development to project management, to teaching creative writing, in a Liverpool career spanning over thirty years.
In 2013 he became a man of theoretical leisure and currently (2018) writes short stories, volunteers on a local sustainability project, nurtures a third of an allotment, co-organises and performs at regular poetry and story-telling events in Liverpool and cycles nearly everywhere.
He has had his poetry published in numerous magazines and won prizes. Driftwood Publications brought out his first collection, Human Geography, in 2005. His second, Taking Down the Tree House, was published by Headland Publications in 2011. He has read at poetry venues across the UK, but is always ready for more (have senior rail card, will travel).
He is an experienced playwright and has taught theatre writing, poetry and general creative writing. He likes doing it, does it well and is still open to offers.
Since 2010, he has been writing short stories and flash fiction and has had twenty or so published in magazines and anthologies, both on-line and in print. He is currently (2018) hoping to get his first collection published before too long.
For all but two of the last eighteen years (or is it nineteen?) he has been in loco parentis (or Poetry Father) for the Poetry Society's Young Poets Award writing week at one of the Arvon Foundation's writing centres.
He was a founder member of the Liverpool Theatre Resource Centre; Goodstuff Press, a community publishing venture; and the Dead Good Poets Society, which has triumphantly survived the vagaries of arts funding (and lack of it) since 1991.