University at Buffalo (UB)
In Memorium: Professor Tyrone Williams, David Gray Chair of Poetry and Letters
Professor Tyrone Williams, David Gray Chair of Poetry and Letters, passed away on March 11, 2024, a short time after a cancer diagnosis. He was 70.
Professor Williams is widely regarded as one of the leading American poets of the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Embodying a rare combination of extraordinary brilliance and generosity, he is beloved and admired by his contemporaries, and served as an influential, adored mentor to many younger poets.
Born in Detroit, Michigan, Williams received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in English from Wayne State University and taught at Xavier University in Cincinnati for decades, serving as chair of its English department 2000-06.
He joined UB English in Spring 2022, appointed as the David Gray Chair, a position as core faculty in the Poetics Program. Author of eight volumes of poetry and many critical articles, Williams was an exemplary poet-scholar, a practitioner of and a leading academic expert in experimental poetry and poetics, as well as a specialist in African American literature and aesthetics and literary theory. Williams was highly active presenting papers at academic conferences and giving poetry readings internationally. He was awarded numerous literary fellowships, including a Baltic Writer Residency and residencies at Djerassi, Casa Libre de Solana, Headlands Center for the Arts, and Fundacion Valparaiso, while he also served as Poet-in-Residence at the Center for African American Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh. In 2020, he received the Stephen Henderson Award for Outstanding Achievement in Literature and Poetry, from the African American Literature and Culture Society. In his significant service to the profession, he wrote innumerable reviews for books by both new and established authors, while he also acted as judge for prizes and publications.
In his short time in Buffalo, Professor Williams had already made a profound impact on graduate and undergraduate students and on poets in the larger Buffalo community. He is and will be profoundly missed as professor, colleague, mentor, and friend, as we continue to study his groundbreaking artistic and scholarly work.
Tyrone, you are greatly loved and admired. Thank you.
Selected Bibliography
Archive
Professor Williams’s papers are archived in the Poetry Collection, University at Buffalo.
Finding aid: https://findingaids.lib.buffalo.edu/repositories/3/resources/1256
Poetry
Stilettos in a Rifle Range (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2022)
washpark, with Pat Clifford (Delete Press, 2021)
Line 9, Part I (Oakland: Compline, 2020)
As Iz (Oakland: Omnidawn, 2018)
Trump l’oeil (Buffalo: Hostile Press 2017)
Between Red & Green: Narrative of the Black Brigade: a storytelling poem (Loveland: Dos Madres, 2016)
Howell (Berkeley: Atelos, 2011)
Adventures of Pi: Poems 1980-1990 (Loveland: Dos Madres, 2011)
Pink tie (Oakland: Hooke Press, 2011)
The Hero Project of the Century (Omaha: Backwaters press, 2009)
On Spec (Richmond: Omnidawn, 2008)
c.c. (San Francisco: Krupskaya, 2002)
Criticism
Inciting Poetics: Thinking and Writing Poetry (U of New Mexico Press, 2019). Co-edited with Jeanne Heuving.
“A Petite Book, A Little Exile,” Where The Wanting Leads Us: Reading the Poetry of Norman Finkelstein. Ed: J. Peter Moore (Madhat Books, 2021), 31-42.
“Alongside and With: Lorenzo Thomas, the Lower East Side and Umbra,” Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, Vol. 45 (2021), 129-144.
“Circumambulation: Cowrie Shells, Bottle Caps and Balloons in Nathaniel Mackey’s From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate.” A Forest on Many Stems: The Poet’s Novel. Ed. Laynie Browne (Nightboat Books, 2021), 411-21.
“Incidents: Baraka, Cullen, Trethewey,” Some Other Blues: New Perspectives on Amiri Baraka (Ohio State Press, 2021), 47-54.
“‘The Changing Same’: Value in Marx and Amiri Baraka,” Communism and Poetry: Writing Against Capital. Ed. Ruth Jennison and Julian Murphet (Palgrave McMillan, 2019), 75-107.
“Sentimental Educations: Gil Scott-Heron’s The Last Holiday and Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth,” Old Pal 2 (2019).
“Deconstructing the Public Sphere: African American ‘Slaves’ in Autobiography and Fiction,” A Perfect Vacuum (February 2019).
“Bounded and Unbounded Field Functions in Russell Atkins and Charles Olson,” Journal of Foreign Languages and Literature 2:1 (June 2018), 63-68.
“Detroit (En)closures: After Fordism and Gordyism,” COAST/NoCOAST, No.1 (2018), 111-119.
“The Uncertainties of Michael Heller.” The Poetry and Poetics of Michael Heller: A Nomad Memory (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2015), 35-48.
“The Authenticity of Difference as ‘curious thing[s]’: Carl Phillips, Ed Roberson and Erica Hunt,” boundary 2 42:4 (November 2015), 123-138.
“Radical Mimesis: Conceptual Dialectics and the African Diaspora,” Postmodern Culture (2017).
“Death of Maidens: Birth of Precariats: The Poetry of Jose Felipe Alvergue and Brenda Iijima,” Tzak (October 2015).
“Reginald and Me.” The Force of What’s Possible: Writers on Accessibility & The Avant-Garde. Ed. Lily Hoang and Joshua Marie Wilkinson. (Nightboat Books, 2014), 336-38.
“’To Be Set to Music’: The Rhetorical-Aural Poetry-Dramas of Russell Atkins.” Russell Atkins: On the Life & Work of an American Master (Pleiades Press/Unsung Masters Series, 2013), 160-182.
“The Radical and Bourgeois Leftism of Harold Cruse,” Black Writers and the Left. Ed. Kristin Moriah (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 189-208.
“A ‘Minor’ Opus: The Friend-Specific Art of Wendy (Dee Dee) Kramer,” Northside Review 1 (2012), 52-64.
“Disaster Suites: The Present Poetics of Rob Halpern,” Crisis Inquiry: A Special Edition Of Damn the Caesars (2012), 115-121.
“The Pan African Americanism of Melvin B. Tolson,” Flashpoint 14 (Spring 2012).
“Before the Laws: The Secular, Sacred and Aesthetic Cases of Lawrence Joseph,” Jacket2 (February 2012).
“A=B=l=a=c=k=W=o=m=a=n Poetics: The Prose Poetry of Erica Hunt,” ON: A Journal of Poetics 2 (2010), 145-54.