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.
Questlove on Baraka
Further notes on PoemTalk episode 128
In 2018, PoemTalk's 128th episode was made — a conversation in which Tyrone Williams, Aldon Nielsen, and William J. Harris joined me in the Arts Cafe of the Kelly Writers House to talk before a live audience about Amiri Baraka’s poem “Something in the Way of Things (In Town).” Go HERE for a program note and links to the edited audio recording of the episode and also an unedited video recording. Recently we found a relevant piece published in the New York Times four years earlier. It was written by Questlove, and it refers to the studio session in which The Roots collaborated with Baraka to record "Something in the Way of Things."