Poetry. African American Studies. "These pre-C.C. posts stream to us from some point 'prior to predication.' It's a place Tyrone Williams has been exploring on our behalf for a good, long time, beamed up, as it were, from some Ohio of the spirit, sending his missives back to us here on planet Grammar, a place of our own constant care and making where 'meanwhile means dissent.' These are poems that teach us how to read them, or rather, teach us the deep structures that we didn't know we knew. Take, for just one instance, the perfectly rhymed, perfectly logical line, 'X nee YHWH.' The here unaccented 'nee'-sayer marks the places the vowels should go, the Xed out spot the tongue should find in history, the unspeakable languages of our own territorial claims. That's a lot of work for one line to do, but that's in the nature of scripture. Tyrone Williams has been hard on the case on our behalf. We owe him at the least a collective thank-you post-it."—Aldon Lynn Nielsen

Author City: CINCINNATI, OH USA

Tyrone Williams teaches literature and theory at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is the author of four books of poetry—C.C. (Krupskaya, 2002), ON SPEC (Omnidawn Publishing, 2008), THE HERO PROJECT OF THE CENTURY (The Backwaters Press, 2009), ADVENTURES OF PI (Dos Madres Press, 2011), and HOWELL (Atelos, 2011) —and several chapbooks, including a prose eulogy, Pink Tie (Hooke Press, 2011). His poems have been published in magazines, including Chicago Review, DENVER QUARTERLY, The Kenyon Review, Caliban, Colorado Review, and XCP. And his poems have been anthologized in anthologies, including RAINBOW DARKNESS: AN ANTHOLOGY OF AFRICAN AMERICAN POETRY (Miami University Press, 2005) and Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (Scribner, 2003). Williams received his doctorate of English from Wayne State University. He was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan.

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