On the sermons of Tyrone Williams
A lay preacher, as well as the distinguished poet, critic, and English professor I had known him to be, Tyrone had delivered the sermons at the Winton Community Free Methodist Church in Cincinnati, where he worshipped from 1987, when he began teaching full time at Xavier, until he took his position as a distinguished chair in the English Department at Buffalo in Spring 2022.
Six months after Tyrone Williams died from cancer at age seventy on March 11, 2024, I accessed the texts of seventeen sermons he had composed and that were now housed in the “Theological, 2001-2021” section of his archive at SUNY Buffalo.
Lives and semilives in the balance: A brief dossier on the brink of biohazard
Perhaps too much of bio-poetic work (and commentary) risks falling into a starry-eyed vision of a blissfully ever-expanding genetic future. As if in response, bio-artists Ionat Zurr and Oron Catts ask, “Are the semi-living semi-good or semi-evil?”, a parodic question hinting at the problems that ensue when humans intervene into the nonhuman dimensions of virus and bacteria.