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.
Cathy Park Hong's 'Dance Dance Revolution'
Written in 2007, Cathy Park Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution is set in a hyperreal, dystopic 2016.
While the text does not self-identify as an epic, the genre tropes are present throughout. There is a quest, a journey, and an invented vernacular that meters many of the lines. We are introduced to the protagonist-heroine guide Chun Sujin, the “talky Virgil,” who prefers to be called the Guide and who will lead a visiting Historian through the Desert city, telling stories about her South Korean upbringing and her current life alongside other Desert city residents.