Derek JG Williams is an American writer and the author of Reading Water (2025), selected by Eduardo Corral as the winner of the Lightscatter Press Prize, and Poetry Is a Disease (Greying Ghost, 2022). His poems and prose are published in Pleiades, The Writer’s Chronicle, Plume, New Ohio Review, Banshee, Salamander, Best New Poets, and Prairie Schooner, among others. He holds a doctorate in English and Creative Writing from Ohio University, and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He lives in Zurich with his family.

Other poems on the web by Derek JG Williams:
"Heat Lightning"
"These Kingdoms of Ours"
"King of The Minotaurs, 1958"
"Mammals"
"Skin & Bones"
Two poems
"The Slow Dissolve"
"Elegy, Much Later"
"Ain't Nothing to Fuck With"

Derek JG Williams's Website.

About Reading Water:

"In this mesmerizing book, the 'rich vanishing seasons' of life are rendered beautifully. Each poem about family, each about travel, each poem about love is fluid and precise and memorable. Memory, here, is the 'strongest / of the senses' and its strength is amplified by a deft shaping of the line and a startling imagination rippling in the phrasing, in the imagery. Love, here, is a keyword. These poems radiate with tenderness for parents, for the dead, for a wife. In one poem, the speaker buries his nose 'in the warm / neck' of a dog to 'tell him exactly / how I feel,' and in another poem, he confesses, 'too briefly I love everyone.' This book also centers language: its power, its thingness, and the shadows it casts on the page, in our lives. I had the honor of reading terrific manuscripts for this prize. This book stood out because it was obvious each poem had been shaped by a mind and a heart. Bravo!"
—Eduardo Corral

"Derek JG Williams' direct and wide-ranging first book of poems, Reading Water, is full of real pleasures, finding beauty and joy around surprising corners. These poems explore our particular American moment, all of us figuring out what to do with our angers and our loves. We are welcomed in with frank assessments, 'twilight & dusk, / talking shit, the rich, thick gloam / of my young dumb life.' Tom Petty songs and soup, hugging your mom and 'another war on TV,' getting high in the cemetery and throwing chairs, video games and very good dogs: these poems reckon with our losses and celebrate the everyday. A little suspicious, a little hungry, at a party or talking about who should have what guns in 'dumb, broke America,' Reading Water helps us think about what it is to be in a relationship and in a family, being ourselves and doing our best. Often funny, always tender, these poems are with us whether we are holding hands, teaching, bartending, or having to pee: 'the dunes part / it's low tide and briefly / too briefly I love everyone.' "
—Jill McDonough

"Reading Water dives deep and dares us to hold our breath. The range here is expansive, with poems both personal and cultural. We find a monologue in the voice of Pavlov's dog, a painting by Picasso, a nod to Gertrude Stein, lyrical odes to the sound of a lover peeing, to prizefighters and starlings, and underneath the glittering surfaces of form, in the depths between water and skin, in long lines and short forms that shimmer like light on water, you will find the intricacies of our own frail human hearts."
—Sean Thomas Dougherty