William Eric Waters
Writer. Scholar. Educator. Advocate.
I have spent much of my writing life thinking about a deceptively simple question:
Who gets to define a human life?
The law does it. A conviction can turn a person into a “criminal.” A sentence can turn a person into a “prisoner.” Race has supplied America with definitions of danger, innocence, citizenship, belonging, and worth since before there was a United States.
History does it, too—by deciding whose stories are remembered, whose suffering is recorded, and whose voices are left out.
I write about those definitions—and about the human beings who are always more complicated than the words and institutions used to define them.
My poetry, fiction, scholarship, essays, teaching, and criminal-justice work may occupy different worlds. To me, they belong to the same conversation.
Writing Across Forms
In poetry, I return to history and memory. I write about Black life, violence and survival, fathers and sons, love, loss, race, America, and the stubborn human impulse to hope.
In fiction, I put people inside conundrums. Law and justice are not always the same thing. Neither are guilt and responsibility, punishment and accountability, or imprisonment and redemption. Fiction allows me to enter the difficult space between them.
In scholarship and research, I ask who gets to produce knowledge. People who have experienced prisons, parole, punishment, and other institutions know things about those systems that cannot be learned entirely from the outside. Lived expertise is not a substitute for rigorous research. It is knowledge that rigorous research should not ignore.
In essays and cultural criticism, I connect the present to what came before it. Literature, Black history, criminal justice, politics, memory, and personal experience continually intersect because America did not arrive at its present condition without a history.
Different forms. Different voices.
The questions remain.
Lived Experience. Lived Expertise.
The criminal legal system is not something I discovered in a book.
My relationship to these questions includes firsthand experience of incarceration and parole, earlier prison writing, decades of criminal-justice and nonprofit work, advocacy, participatory research, scholarship, and teaching.
Those experiences do not make every conclusion I reach correct. They do mean that I approach institutions with questions that might be different from those asked by someone who has only observed them from a distance.
Who is speaking? Who is being spoken for? Who is believed? Who is reduced to a label? What does the official record leave out?
Those are questions of justice.
They are also questions of literature.
My published research has pursued the same problem in another form—from participatory work examining parole practices to the 2013 peer-reviewed article How Much Punishment Is Enough? and the 2025 MDRC publication Incorporating “Lived Expertise” into Research.
Lived expertise, as I understand it, means recognizing that people directly affected by institutions possess knowledge about those institutions that serious research should not disregard.
Featured Work
Conundrums: Stories of Law & Justice
What happens when the law gives us an answer—but justice remains unsettled?
In Conundrums, ten stories place judges, prisoners, lawyers, families, and ordinary people inside situations where guilt may not settle responsibility, punishment may not produce justice, and the legally correct answer may not be the morally satisfying one.
Explore Conundrums: Stories of Law & Justice →
The Black Blood of Poetry
Black history is not merely something that happened.
It survives in memory, language, family, culture, grief, resistance, and the stories America tells about itself. The Black Blood of Poetry enters that history through poems concerned with Black life, injustice, survival, literary tradition, cultural memory, and remembrance.
Explore The Black Blood of Poetry →
Black Shadows and Through the White Looking Glass
My award-winning epic poem confronts American history through Black memory, examining slavery, its aftermath, and the experience of Black people in America.
The past is not past simply because the calendar moves forward.
Black Shadows and Through the White Looking Glass was a co-winner of the 1998 Edwin Mellen Poetry Prize.
Explore Black Shadows and Through the White Looking Glass →
Research as Resistance
Research about people and research with people are not necessarily the same thing.
My writing on participatory research and parole asks what changes when people with lived expertise help formulate questions, interpret evidence, and produce knowledge about systems that have exercised power over their lives.
Read “Research as Resistance” →
Enter the Work
Books
One epic poem, three poetry collections, one novel, and one short-story collection form the core of my published creative books.
Scholarship & Essays
Selected research, scholarship, essays, and criticism on criminal justice, parole, punishment, lived expertise, participatory research, race, African American literature, advocacy, and public policy.
Explore Scholarship & Essays →
Selected Writing & Continuing Projects
Ezwwaters.com is also an evolving archive of essays, commentary, literary criticism, reflection, and continuing projects, including The Anatomy of Advocacy, Journey Through Crime, Justice & Literature, and the Conundrums Quotation Project.
About William Eric Waters
My literary, scholarly, educational, teaching, and professional history—and the connections among them.
One Writer, Several Names
Readers may encounter my work under several names.
William Eric Waters is my principal public and professional identity on this site. My poetry and some scholarship have been published as William E. Waters. My fiction and some earlier prison writing appear under the literary name Easy Waters. The 2025 MDRC publication Incorporating “Lived Expertise” into Research carries the byline Eric Waters.
Different names mark different forms and moments in the writing life.
They belong to one writer and one creative and intellectual record.
Who Gets to Tell the Story?
Poetry and scholarship are usually placed on different shelves. Fiction and public policy belong to different professional worlds. Personal memory is often separated from history. Lived experience is too often separated from expertise.
I have never found those divisions particularly useful.
A court record can tell us what someone was convicted of without telling us who that person is. A prison file can document a sentence without explaining a life. History can record an event without preserving the experience of the people who lived through it. Research can produce data about people without ever making room for what those people know.
Literature can enter those silences.
So can memory.
So can rigorous research that takes lived expertise seriously.
Across these forms, I continue returning to the same fundamental struggle: the power of institutions to define human beings, and the power of human beings to answer those definitions with stories of their own.
Ezwwaters.com is the central online home and evolving archive of that work.
William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters 