Hobart and William Smith Colleges

When poet and scholar Tyrone Williams died in 2024, Claire Tranchino ’18 and her colleagues at the University at Buffalo discovered a piece of his literary legacy waiting in the archives.  

A scholar and prolific reviewer of poetry and culture, Williams published nearly 150 reviews between 1975 and 2023, exploring literary criticism, experimental poetry, African American writing and the ways writers and musicians navigate questions of gender, class and race. 

The author of eight poetry collections, he spent decades teaching at Xavier University before joining the University at Buffalo, SUNY as the David Gray Chair of Poetry and Letters. 

A Ph.D. candidate and Presidential Fellow in English at the University at Buffalo, Tranchino studies 20th- and 21st-century American literature, specializing in poetry. Her research on contemporary Black poets draws on theories of gender and race. 

“It was rare for a poet to devote so much of his career to engaging deeply with other writers' work,” Tranchino says. 

Over nearly five decades, Williams’ writing shifted increasingly from music criticism toward literature and poetry.  

Tranchino worked with colleagues to create Ludic Pleasures: Reviews on Poetry, Poetics, and Culture, a nearly 250-page collection forthcoming from SUNY Press in November.  

Tranchino co-edited the collection with Cristanne Miller, Distinguished Professor and Edward H. Butler Professor of English Emerita at the University at Buffalo, and Aaron VanSteinberg, a fellow Ph.D. candidate in English at UB. 

Bringing Williams’ work to a wider audience required its own process of discovery. Tranchino and her co-editors sorted through Williams’ archival materials, newspapers, literary journals, and online publications while working closely with curators in the University at Buffalo’s Special Collections. 

Tranchino has also conducted archival research on poet Norma Cole, supported by a Riverrun fellowship at the University at Buffalo's Poetry Collection. Her resulting essay appeared in a collection published by the University of New Mexico Press in 2025. 

“Working with someone’s archival materials is always a very humbling experience,” she says. “It made me realize that I’m interested in being that kind of bridge between the materials in an archive and sharing that material with a broader public.” 

Tranchino's research in poetry, gender and race builds on interests she developed as an English and gender studies double major at HWS. She remembers courses in American poetry as foundational to her approach to literature today.  

A modernist American poetry course with Professor of English and Creative Writing Geoffrey Babbitt inspired her to keep studying poetry, while classes with Professors Kathryn Cowles and Stephen Cope exposed her to the expansiveness of contemporary writing. 

Working with professors who were poets themselves also taught Tranchino to look beyond a finished text and consider the process used to create it — a perspective that would later become especially valuable in the archive. 

“I developed a particular sensibility in how I tend to read poems and how I tend to read literature and literary criticism,” she says. “It was because of the wide range of materials that we looked at and had to respond to.” 

Beyond the classroom, the Trias Residency for Writers gave Tranchino opportunities to attend readings and seminars with visiting poets and fiction writers. Together, those experiences made literature feel less like something confined to the page and more like an active community of writers, scholars and readers. 

“There was a very lively interaction between the English Department and the Trias program,” she says. “Having the opportunity to go to readings and participate in seminars with those writers definitely gave you the feeling that this is an animated arena for work.” 

Now, Tranchino hopes Ludic Pleasures can offer readers what HWS offered her: an entry point into the breadth of contemporary poetry. 

“My hope for the book is that, in a way, it can be read as a kind of primer or introduction to contemporary American poetry,” she says. “That is also what I associate HWS with making available to me as a student.” 

The November launch events will begin Wednesday, Nov. 18, at 4:30 p.m. in Buffalo, N.Y., with brief presentations by the editors and a pop-up exhibit. A book celebration featuring readings will follow on Thursday, Nov. 19, at 7 p.m. Learn more here.