A memorial celebration on the art and life of poet Tyrone Williams (1954-2024) will be held June 23rd at 6:00-8:00 p.m. at Trinosophe Café located at 1464 Gratiot Avenue in Detroit. The cafe will be open for food and drinks at 5 pm. Book Beat will display books featuring the works of Tyron Williams and other local poets. For questions about the event, please write Kim Hunter at kdhuntermedia@gmail.com
Tyrone Williams passed away on March 11, one month after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. You are invited to attend a literary celebration of his life and work, organized by his fellow Detroit poets.
Friends and family of Tyrone Williams will be on hand to honor his life including Tyrone’s Sisters (Jacqueline Brooks, Wanda Gee, Andrea Martin), Alise Alousi, Rudy Baron, Melba Boyd, Pat Clifford, Lynn Crawford & John Haddad, Tod Duncan, Carla Harryman, Kim Hunter, Barbara Henning, Geoffrey Jacques, M.L. Liebler, Jonah Mixon-Webster, Kofi Natambu (audio), Julie Patton, Lee Sandweiss, Suzanne Scarfone, Dennis Teichman, Chris Tysh and Rayfield Waller. We hope you will come out for the reading and help us celebrate his life.
A Weekend Away
I had never slept as well as I did that first evening.
the cottage rental
bay windows
open to the breezy amenities of Lake Superiorlazy walks
bicycle rides
and a picnicpeppered with profanities, shouts,
the afterglow of rage.–Tyrone Williams from Stilettos in a Rifle Range
Julie Ezelle Patton. I first met Tyrone and his work through poet Brenda Iijima and at literary events in New York City, and beyond. Thanks to Carla Harryman for bringing us together again at the Bathhouse Reading Series (Eastern Michigan University) and to Dawn Lundy Martin and Lauren Russel who hosted us at the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (University of Pittsburgh).
Lee Sandweiss. Born in Detroit in 1955, Lee met Tyrone Williams in 1980, when they were graduate students at Wayne State University. She edited Tyrone’s first chapbook, Convalescence (Ridgeway Press,1987). Lee started her long publishing career at Gale Research Company in Detroit. She lives in Bloomington, Indiana.
Suzanne Scarfone. Tyrone and Suzanne shared an office in State Hall while teaching and working on their doctorates. Tyrone’s happy soul made Suzanne’s life joyful. For over 40 years, they shared with each other the “moments of being” and “spots of time” that continuously popped up as if daily miracles.
Dennis Teichman. I remember Ty reading his poetry when he was still in Detroit and then when he came in from Cinci. Read our words together on many an occasion. The inscriptions he wrote to Deb and I in his books reflect our long friendship.
Chris Tysh. Tyrone was a student in a poetics class I taught in the LINES program that my husband, George, ran at the DIA. This was in the mid ‘80s. Later we became friends as part of the Detroit creative scene.
Rayfield Waller is a poet, cultural critic, labor activist, and political journalist who is a professor of literature, history, and the social sciences at Wayne State University and Wayne County Community College in the postindustrial city of Detroit, Michigan.
Alise Alousi has worked for InsideOut Literary Arts for over two decades. When she met Tyrone many years ago, she was instantly struck by his warmth and deep knowledge of the craft. He wrote a beautiful blurb for her poetry collection, What to Count (WSU Press), and she regrets not having had an opportunity to read together more recently.
Rudy Baron. I was an undergraduate at Wayne State University when I met Tyrone. I had my first poetry reading with him in Mexican Village. He was inspiring. I will never forget that night and how we became good friends through our college years. I also will also never forget his smile, and how he brought joy with him, whenever he was around.
Melba Boyd. I met Tyrone when he began to read his poetry on the Detroit scene. He was a vibrant new voice and an impressive presence. We were both published by M. L. Liebler’s Ridgeway Press, and we performed our poetry together at various times. His poetry was also included in Abandon Automobile: Detroit City Poetry 2001 that M.L. and I coedited for Wayne State University Press.
Pat Clifford. Pat first met Tyrone at Xavier in the 1980s. Both were active with a community literacy organization, InkTank, encouraging creative writing with people living in the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood and the Drop Inn Center shelter (Pat was the director). During the last twenty years, they collaborated on several poetry and critical projects including washpark (Delete Press in 2021).
Lynn Crawford. I met Tyrone in the late 1980’s at a poetics workshop led by the great George Tysh at Detroit Institute of Arts. When I moved to NY he visited me and when I returned to Detroit, I visited him (and read) at Xavier. Our brainstorming sessions were sometimes short, more often long. Lynn’s husband, John Hadadd, is the owner and founder of Spectrum Neon.
Carla Harryman. I moved to Detroit in 1995 and gradually got to know Tyrone. For a while I knew him best through his poetry and his criticism. If he were speaking at an academic conference, that would always be a panel I would attend. I organized an AWP panel on Lorenzo Thomas in 2011, which deepened our friendship and a never completed conversation about poetry and music.
Tyrone Williams was born in Detroit, Michigan and earned his BA, MA, and PhD at Wayne State University. He is the author of a number of chapbooks, including Convalescence (1987); Futures, Elections (2004); Musique Noir (2006); and Pink Tie (2011), among others. His full-length collections of poetry include c.c. (2002), On Spec (2008), The Hero Project (2009), Adventures of Pi (2011), and Howell (2011).
Williams’s work draws on a variety of sources to challenge and investigate language, history, and race. In an interview with the Volta Williams noted, “I don’t ‘revere’ the English language but I use it and, on occasion, abuse it.” And of his interest in grammar and linguistics, he stated: “every grammatical marker is purposeful … every torque of the language renders ‘meaning’ problematic—which seems to me the precise ‘condition’ of African-American existence in particular and ‘American’ life in general.”
Williams was the editor of African American Literature: Revised Edition (2008) and taught at Xavier University in Cincinnati. [biography from The Poetry Foundation]
Xavier University posted a Rembrance of Tyron Williams with photos and a biography. Tyrone was professor emeritus of English at Xavier University where he worked for over forty uyears.