Derek JG Williams is an American writer, scholar, teacher, & editor. His debut collection of poems, Reading Water (2025), was selected by Eduardo Corral as the winner of the Lightscatter Press Prize. He's also the author of the nonfiction chapbook, Poetry Is a Disease (Greying Ghost, 2022). Derek holds a doctorate in English & Creative Writing from Ohio University, & an MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where he won the Brian Rattigan & Mary Doyle Curran Creative Scholarships. He is a Blacksmith House Emerging Writer. His poem, "These Kingdoms of Ours" was a finalist for RHINO Magazine's Editors Prize. Brenda Shaughnessy selected his poem “Ode to the Tongue” for inclusion in the Best New Poets anthology. His writing has appeared on Boston's MBTA trains as a part of the city's Poetry on the T program. Derek teaches writing courses online. He also works with individual clients to help them establish & reach their creative goals, & he is an accomplished academic language editor & technical writer who has worked with scholars & researchers at numerous institutions & universities. He lives near Zurich with his family.
CutBank Interviews
An Interview with Derek JG Williams
July 2025
Derek JG Williams’ debut poetry collection Reading Water explores the ways in which experience, relationships, and memory intertwine to shape the currents of the subconscious. The perceptive attention of the poems–cast on everything from the sensory joy of jukeboxes and dumplings, to the contours of party small talk, to cows on a Swiss Alp–integrates experience into the impermanent flow of physical life.
The collection is the winner of the Lightscatter Press award, selected by Eduardo Corral, who praises it for its “deft shaping of the line and a startling imagination rippling in the phrasing, in the imagery.” Williams is also the author of Poetry is a Disease (Greying Ghost, 2022), and his poems and prose can be found in a host of literary journals.
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Derek graciously met with CutBank’s Poetry Editor, Lisa Kouroupis, over Zoom from his home near Zurich, where he lives with his family. They discussed his writing process, the arc of the collection, and his background in performance. Reading Water features a collaboration between Derek’s poetry and a multimedia dance composition, choreographed by Ashley Anderson and linked via QR codes throughout the book. The joining of text, dance vignettes, and audio of Derek reading his poems deepens a theme of ephemerality and brings a pleasurable interactivity to the reading experience. Derek and Lisa started their conversation by talking about that relationship.
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Lisa Kouroupis: The book’s introduction names “the disappearing trace of the moving self” as something innate to dance, and it’s also present in your poems. Can you talk a bit about how the collaboration with Ashley’s work came to be?
Derek JG Williams: For me and for writers in general, I think the idea of collaboration is somewhat of an anathema, right? The reason I think a lot of people become writers, or even specifically poets, is that you don’t have to work with anyone. It all comes back to you—it’s you alone in the room, making the decisions, which is appealing, but there’s a pressure that comes along with it. I was fortunate in Boston, in my twenties, to be surrounded by all different kinds of artists, not just writers. Most of my closest friends were musicians or actors and I think that had a real influence on my writing later on, although at the time I wasn’t writing much that was worth anything to anyone. It was really all still practice at that point.