Donyelle C. McCray is Associate Professor of Homiletics at Yale Divinity School. Her scholarship focuses on the ways African American women and laypeople use sermons to play, remember, invent, and disrupt. She is the author of The Censored Pulpit: Julian of Norwich as Preacher, co-author of A Surprising God: Advent Devotions for an Uncertain Time, and is researching the preaching and spirituality of the Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray. In a forthcoming documentary film and transmedia project, she collaborates with artists on theological responses to gentrification. Before becoming a homiletics professor, McCray served as an estate planning attorney. Existential questions emerged that led her to seminary and to ministry as a hospice chaplain. Consolation, compassion, and interdependence continue to be core themes in her scholarship.