William Eric Waters — Author, Scholar, Educator & Criminal-Justice Leader
William Eric Waters is an award-winning poet, fiction writer, essayist, educator, criminal-justice scholar, and nonprofit executive. Publishing as William E. Waters, Eric Waters, and Easy Waters, he has built a body of work spanning poetry, fiction, scholarship, lived expertise, public policy, African American literature, and criminal-justice reform.
Across these forms, Waters returns to enduring questions about race, punishment, institutional power, memory, accountability, redemption, resilience, and justice.
Explore the Work
Books
Explore Waters’s one epic poem, three poetry collections, one novel, and one short-story collection, published under the names William E. Waters and Easy Waters.
Scholarship & Essays
Read selected scholarship and essays on criminal justice, parole, lived expertise, participatory research, advocacy, race, punishment, African American literature, and cultural criticism.
About William Eric Waters
Learn about Waters’s literary work, scholarship, teaching, professional leadership, education, awards, and the relationship among his publishing names.
Writing Across Forms
Waters’s writing moves across forms without separating the questions that animate them. His poetry places Black history, memory, violence, survival, and cultural identity inside the pressure of language. His fiction examines people confronting law, institutions, consequence, and moral ambiguity. His scholarship and essays investigate criminal justice, punishment, parole, advocacy, race, public policy, literature, and the role of lived expertise in producing knowledge.
Taken together, the work asks how institutions shape human lives—and how literature, research, memory, and experience can reveal what institutions often obscure.
Featured Work
- Conundrums: Stories of Law & Justice — a short-story collection by Easy Waters examining law, imprisonment, institutional power, accountability, memory, redemption, and resilience.
- The Black Blood of Poetry — a poetry collection by William E. Waters rooted in Black history, cultural memory, injustice, survival, and literary tradition.
- Black Shadows and Through the White Looking Glass: Remembrance of Things Past and Present — an award-winning epic poem by William E. Waters examining Black history and the experience of Black people in America through slavery and its aftermath.
- Research as Resistance: Building Knowledge Together in the Fight for Parole Justice — an account of participatory research, lived expertise, and advocacy.
Selected Writing & Ongoing Projects
Ezwwaters.com is also an active archive of essays, commentary, literary criticism, reflections, and continuing projects. Recent and ongoing gateway series include The Anatomy of Advocacy, Journey Through Crime, Justice & Literature, and the Conundrums Quotation Project.
These projects extend the same central concerns found throughout the books and scholarship: how stories are told, how systems define people, how history shapes the present, and how language can challenge inherited assumptions about crime, justice, race, punishment, and human possibility.
One Writer, Several Publishing Names
William Eric Waters, William E. Waters, Eric Waters, and Easy Waters refer to the same writer and scholar. William Eric Waters is the principal public and professional identity used across this site; William E. Waters appears on his poetry and some scholarship; Easy Waters is the literary pen name used for fiction and some earlier prison writing; and Eric Waters appears on his 2025 MDRC research publication.
Ezwwaters.com is the central online home of that creative, scholarly, and public record.
William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters 