William Eric Waters, also known as Easy Waters, discusses his development as a writer, his experience writing and publishing while incarcerated, his long relationship with the PEN Prison Writing Program, literary mentorship, prison literature, criminal justice, and the relationship between writing and freedom in this July 12, 2018 oral-history interview.
Waters encountered PEN first as an incarcerated writer seeking what he describes as his voice. He submitted work to PEN’s prison-writing contest, received multiple PEN Prison Writing awards, developed relationships with established writers, and later joined the PEN Prison Writing Committee. That progression eventually placed him on both sides of the prison wall: first as the person sending writing into the “free world,” and later as a committee member reading and evaluating writing sent from prisons throughout the United States.
The conversation reaches well beyond PEN. Waters describes becoming a journalist, poet, essayist, editor, and jailhouse lawyer while incarcerated; the importance of Fielding Dawson and other literary mentors; his extensive reading; his criticism of American crime reporting; the First Amendment and writing from prison; higher education and incarceration; and his conviction that prison writing deserves recognition as literature rather than treatment merely as rehabilitation or testimony.
Near the interview’s conclusion, Waters discusses a nonfiction project he was then developing under the title No Rights That Are Bound To Be Respected. Its projected title essay would use the 1857 Dred Scott decision to examine mass incarceration and the continuing relationship among race, crime, punishment, policing, and the American criminal legal system.
Interview Details
Interviewee: William Eric Waters
Also known as: Easy Waters
Interviewer/transcriber: elly kalfus
Date: July 12, 2018
Location: Columbia INCITE office, Manhattan
Language: English
Original recorded interview: approximately 105 minutes
Subject: PEN Prison Writing Program and Waters’s development as a writer
The supplied transcript identifies two original audio files and states that yellow highlighting in the source denotes the transcriber’s best guesses concerning unclear words or proper names.
Editor’s Note
This selected and edited reading edition is based on the supplied 25-page transcript of the July 12, 2018 interview. It preserves the substance, chronology, and spoken character of the conversation while making a lengthy oral history easier to read and navigate online. Speaker labels are standardized; timestamps and audio-file markers are omitted except where necessary to document uncertainty or interruption; obvious formatting artifacts are corrected; and thematic headings have been added for navigation.
The headings are editorial and were not spoken during the original interview. Where the source transcript identifies wording as uncertain, that uncertainty is not intended to be converted silently into an authoritative reading. This is a selected edition, not a verbatim reproduction of all approximately 105 minutes of recorded conversation. The page below is a selected reading edition; the original transcript remains the archival source.
Selected and Edited Oral-History Transcript
1. Finding a Voice Through PEN Prison Writing
elly kalfus: Hi, this is elly kalfus. And today is Thursday, July 12th. It’s 6:14 and I’m sitting here with—would you introduce yourself?
William Eric Waters: William Eric Waters, also known as Easy Waters.
elly kalfus: Thank you. And we’re sitting in the INCITE office at Columbia to talk about the PEN Prison Writing Program. So Eric, just to start off, could you tell me, how did you come to be the person sitting here before me?
William Eric Waters: That’s a real long story. So let me see if I can give you the Reader’s Digest version.
I became involved with the PEN Prison Writing Project as a writer writing from prison, as a person trying to find his voice, as a person who came to realize that even in prison, you could wield some power, through the PEN.
And I initially got involved writing journalistic pieces and poetry. Almost everybody in prison tries to write poetry because they think that it’s easy.
I learned, and ultimately fast-forward a number of years, that poetry is really hard. It’s one of the most demanding forms.
Waters goes on to describe serving on PEN’s Prison Writing Committee and its poetry subcommittee. Poetry, he recalls, received particularly large numbers of submissions. Committee members worked through substantial stacks of entries, progressively narrowing them to winners and honorable mentions. Among the submissions, Waters remembers encountering both weak work and “absolute gems.” But his evaluation of that writing was inseparable from his understanding of the circumstances under which it had been produced.
2. Reading Prison Writing from “Both Sides of the Wall”
Waters describes receiving handwritten contest entries from incarcerated writers who lacked access to typewriters or word processors. Some wrote on the reverse side of disciplinary reports because paper itself was restricted. Writers in solitary confinement sometimes explained that they had only a handful of sheets available each week.
William Eric Waters: I just sometimes felt that other committee members didn’t appreciate what it took for that writer to get that work out into the world, and what the price may have been.
Sometimes, he explains, writing had to be smuggled outside.
William Eric Waters: I had an appreciation and understanding because of my experience of incarceration, what it meant to put words on paper and send them out, into what people in prison sometimes call “the free world,” which sometimes doesn’t look all that free.
He characterizes his position as unusual because he had experienced PEN from both directions: he had written from prison, received awards and published a book, and later joined the committee that evaluated incarcerated writers. That experience informs one of the central propositions of the interview: literary merit and the circumstances under which prison writing is produced must both be taken seriously.
3. Fielding Dawson, Mentorship, and Critical Feedback
Waters identifies critical feedback as one of the resources most frequently unavailable to people developing as writers in prison. One of the most consequential relationships resulting from PEN was his correspondence with writer Fielding Dawson. Waters recalls approximately a decade of correspondence with Dawson, who offered criticism of his work and shared his own writing.
PEN also connected writers with mentors. Waters describes another mentor who encouraged him to move beyond the free verse he had been writing and experiment with established poetic forms.
William Eric Waters: If you ultimately make connections with professional writers, they help expand your worldview as a writer. Whether you are a poet, an essayist, a novelist or writing nonfiction.
Waters also recalls committee members being encouraged to respond to writers who had not won but had come close, including honorable mentions. For an incarcerated writer with little access to knowledgeable literary criticism, he argues, even a relatively brief response from an established writer could provide significant encouragement.
4. Growing Up in Brooklyn and Becoming a Writer
Asked where he grew up, Waters answers immediately:
William Eric Waters: I’m a born and bred Brooklynite, and I’m proud of it.
He describes growing up in Williamsburg and initially wanting to become an architect. He attended a vocational and technical high school and retained his fascination with architecture into adulthood. When kalfus asks whether architecture and poetry have something in common, Waters responds:
William Eric Waters: The writer and the poet, we build with words.
The architectural metaphor becomes an illuminating description of his conception of writing: structure, intention, craft, and the experience created for the reader. The interview then moves to incarceration. Waters says that he was 16 when he entered the criminal legal system as an adult. From there the discussion moves toward the development of his interest in journalism and the representation of crime.
5. Journalism, Crime Reporting, and the Language of Punishment
Waters traces an important part of his development as a writer to dissatisfaction with newspaper coverage of crime. After reading a news account concerning someone he knew, he concluded that the reporting did not correspond with what he understood about the event. That experience led him to study basic journalistic principles and to scrutinize crime reporting more closely.
He became particularly concerned with the boundary between reporting and editorializing.
William Eric Waters: If it’s a news story, you know, stick to journalism 101. Who, what, when, where, why.
While incarcerated, he wrote letters to editors, guest editorials and journalistic pieces, including writing for the Hudson Valley Black Press. He describes reading virtually everything he encountered about crime and punishment “with a critical eye.” He was especially attentive to language and criticizes journalists for adopting terminology originating with law enforcement rather than identifying it explicitly as law-enforcement language.
6. “I Write, Therefore I Am”
One of the interview’s defining moments occurs when Waters describes what writing became during incarceration.
William Eric Waters: Writing had become part of my identity. I could not imagine myself without writing. I write, therefore I am.
Eventually, he recalls, correctional officers explaining the population to newer staff would point him out and say:
William Eric Waters: “He’s the writer.”
William Eric Waters: Writing, even for the guards and the civilians, gave me the identity of a writer, not an inmate or a prisoner. That became my identity. It was my identity, that’s how I saw myself.
He describes approaching local newspapers when transferred to different prisons and offering to report from inside. He also studied law and worked as a jailhouse lawyer. Writing functioned simultaneously as identity, intellectual discipline, communication with the outside world, public witness and, at times, protection.
7. Writing, Advocacy, and the First Amendment in Prison
Waters recounts an incident involving a racist flyer allegedly brought into a New York prison by a correction officer. Copies were made and distributed to visitors, producing an investigation. Waters’s criticism was directed at the institutional response: investigators, he recalls, appeared more concerned with identifying the incarcerated people who had copied and distributed the flyer than with identifying the staff member who had introduced it.
After being interviewed by an inspector general, Waters wrote a letter to the editor of a local newspaper. It was published shortly afterward. The episode illustrates his conception of writing as a mechanism of accountability.
William Eric Waters: I wasn’t going to back down to writing about what I saw, what I experienced, chips fall where they may.
The larger discussion places prison writing within questions of First Amendment protection, institutional secrecy, accountability, and the ability of incarcerated people to communicate conditions behind prison walls to the public.
8. “Endless Punishment Is a Crime”
Waters recalls writing a 1985 guest editorial following Governor Mario Cuomo’s exercise of executive clemency in the case of Gary McGivern and a subsequent parole decision. The piece, which Waters remembers as appearing in Newsday, was titled “Endless Punishment Is a Crime.” The publication generated what Waters calls his first piece of hate mail.
William Eric Waters: That’s when I truly felt like a writer, when my first piece of hate mail. I said, “I guess I am a writer.”
The anecdote joins several recurring strands of the interview: parole, excessive punishment, public attitudes toward incarcerated people, journalism, advocacy, and the writer’s willingness to enter contested public arguments.
9. Reading, Education, and Literary Influences
Waters describes taking college-level courses while incarcerated and enrolling in virtually every English and literature course available to him. But much of his education as a writer was self-directed.
William Eric Waters: I just read widely and wrote until I fell asleep, and did that almost every day.
He recalls teaching literacy to other incarcerated men, writing letters for people who could not write them themselves, and becoming what he calls a “scribe.” Through prison libraries and interlibrary loan, Waters gained access to a much larger literary world.
Among the writers and books discussed in the interview are Alexandre Dumas and The Count of Monte Cristo, Dostoyevsky and Crime and Punishment, Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, Gabriel García Márquez and Jimmy Santiago Baca. His identification with Edmond Dantès in The Count of Monte Cristo is particularly revealing: he initially read the novel as a story of revenge but came to understand it more deeply as a story of transformation, in which a young imprisoned man is educated by an older mentor.
10. PEN Awards and the Prison Writing Contest
Returning directly to PEN, Waters recalls learning about the prison-writing contest, probably through a publication of the Fortune Society. He did not win immediately. Instead, he describes continuing to submit work. In one episode, Waters recalls editing a friend’s essay only to have the friend win a PEN prize before Waters did.
William Eric Waters: That just made me even more determined, like, every year. I’m sending something to PEN until they give me an award.
He eventually submitted across several genres, including poetry, fiction and nonfiction, and recalls placing repeatedly through awards or honorable mentions. One work discussed is “Days in the Life of a Jailhouse Lawyer,” which Waters considered fiction rooted closely in autobiography but which PEN apparently treated differently in the contest. The conversation illustrates the fluidity among memoir, autobiographical fiction and nonfiction in prison writing.
11. Prison Literature as American Literature
This is one of the interview’s central literary arguments. Waters rejects the assumption that writing produced in prison should be valued merely because writing may be therapeutic or rehabilitative. Those effects may matter, but they do not answer the literary question.
Throughout the interview, he insists that serious literature can—and does—emerge from prisons. He repeatedly returns to a provocative proposition: somewhere in an American prison, someone may be laboring over what will become a great American novel.
He recalls later participating with Bell Chevigny and others in an academic conference panel arguing that prison writing was worthy of study in the academy.
William Eric Waters: Prison literature, yes literature, is worthy of study at the academy.
William Eric Waters: It fits in with American literature. People in prison writing in America, writing from prison.
For Waters, the reluctance to recognize American prison literature also has political implications. Americans may readily recognize the significance of writing produced under incarceration in other countries while resisting comparable scrutiny of American prisons. Prison writing therefore occupies the intersection of literature, history, testimony and institutional critique.
12. Writing After Release
Waters dates his release with characteristic humor:
William Eric Waters: Election Day 2000. So, George Bush the Second became president. But one good thing happened on that day. They let me go.
He brought his writings with him. Family members helped establish a home office, and he began typing manuscripts and recording his experiences of reentry. Fielding Dawson encouraged him to write about that transition. Waters kept extensive notes for approximately the first two years after release with the possibility of eventually producing a memoir.
William Eric Waters: I had to write. So I wouldn’t lose myself, and I was trying to find my way and I was trying to find my way through, through writing.
At the time of the interview, however, he remained uncertain whether he wanted to return to those materials and publish the memoir. The distinction is important: writing could be personally necessary without necessarily being intended for publication.
13. Teaching, Criminal Justice, and Public Work
By 2018 Waters’s relationship to prisons had changed substantially. He describes teaching leadership at Sing Sing through New York Theological Seminary, managing a mentoring program serving young people ages 16–24, developing a mentoring program for seminary participants and graduates, writing grants for nonprofit organizations, and continuing work on his nonfiction collection.
He also recalls guest teaching in a New York Theological Seminary course in which students read his novel Streets of Rage. This part of the interview completes an important biographical arc: the person who entered prison at 16 and developed himself through reading, journalism, poetry, legal writing and PEN had subsequently returned to correctional institutions as an educator and criminal-justice practitioner. Writing remained the connective tissue among those roles.
14. Dred Scott and “No Rights That Are Bound To Be Respected”
The interview closes with material that, in retrospect, is among its most consequential. Asked what he was working on, Waters describes assembling roughly 30 years of nonfiction—journalistic pieces, essays and book reviews—into a collection. The projected title was No Rights That Are Bound To Be Respected. The title essay, however, remained to be written.
Asked what it would address, Waters answers that it would revolve around the Dred Scott decision:
William Eric Waters: “No Rights That Are Bound To Be Respected,” and it revolves around the Dred Scott decision, and the history of it, and how it has contributed to mass incarceration, and how it plays out today, and how we think about police in certain quarters, how we think about social justice and criminal justice.
William Eric Waters: I just have to figure out—I mean I know exactly what to do—but to bring life to that 1857 decision, to show people that it, it informs how we think, how we look at things today, especially as it relates to race and crime and punishment, and race in that equation of crime and punishment.
Finally, he makes a terminological distinction that is central to the argument:
William Eric Waters: I don’t really call it a justice system, the criminal legal system, right.
He describes wanting to examine how the legacy of Dred Scott may have “insinuated itself into the very fabric” of that system and how ostensibly legal structures can remain deeply contradictory when examined through race, crime and punishment.
elly kalfus: Yeah, that sounds helpful.
William Eric Waters: So if I could write the title essay, I think I’ll have the book. Because everything else is written, I need the title essay.
Selected Themes
PEN Prison Writing Program · prison writing · prison literature · William Eric Waters · Easy Waters · Fielding Dawson · literary mentorship · poetry · journalism · incarceration · First Amendment · prison education · higher education · parole · race and punishment · crime reporting · criminal legal system · lived experience · reentry · African American literature · Dred Scott · mass incarceration
Related Work by William Eric Waters
- About William Eric Waters — current biographical, literary, scholarly, teaching, and professional record.
- Books — the canonical guide to Waters’s epic poem, poetry collections, novel, and short-story collection.
- Scholarship & Essays — selected research and writing on criminal justice, parole, lived expertise, participatory research, race, punishment, literature, and cultural criticism.
- Streets of Rage — the novel discussed in connection with Waters’s teaching at New York Theological Seminary.
- Research as Resistance — later writing connecting participatory research, parole justice, advocacy, and lived expertise.
Source and Provenance Note
This web edition is derived from a supplied transcript titled “Interview with William Eric Waters,” identifying elly kalfus as interviewer/transcriber and dating the interview July 12, 2018. The transcript records the location as the Columbia INCITE office in Manhattan and states at the beginning of the interview that the conversation is being conducted to discuss the PEN Prison Writing Program.
The source identifies approximately 105 minutes of recorded audio divided between two WAV files. It also states that highlighted portions of the source transcript represent the transcriber’s best guesses regarding unclear wording or proper names.
The available source does not, by itself, establish that PEN America commissioned, sponsored, published, or owns this interview. Accordingly, this edition describes the document as an oral-history interview with William Eric Waters about the PEN Prison Writing Program rather than as an official PEN America interview. Institutional provenance and rights have not been independently established by this source.
William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters 