Betts to Read in SBU Writers Series

Gregory Betts, poet, editor, essayist and teacher, is the next presenter in the 2012 Writers Series at St. Bonaventure University, organized by the Department of English and funded by the Good Ideas Grants initiated by the dean of the School of Arts and Sciences.

Betts will read from his works starting at 5:10 p.m. Thursday, April 19, in Dresser Auditorium of the Murphy Professional Building on campus. His presentation is free and open to all.

Betts is the author of five books of poetry including “If Language” (2005), a collection of 56 paragraph-length anagrams, and “The Others Raised in Me” (2009), a sequence of 150 “plunderverse” poems created by deleting words and letters from William Shakespeare’s sonnet 150.

His poetry and experimental prose have been published in journals and magazines across Canada and the United States, as well as in a few European nations. His work has appeared in the conceptual writing anthology “Against Expression.”

Betts is the editor of four collections of experimental writing and author of the forthcoming book “Avant-Garde Canadian Literature: The Early Manifestations” (University of Toronto Press 2012). He is the director of the Centre for Canadian Studies at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada.

Betts will be the third writer to visit campus as part of the 2012 Writers Series. The series included a March 6 presentation by poet, editor and ecocritic Johathan Skinner and a reading by poet, short-story writer and critic Peter Makuck on April 11.

The series concludes Thursday, April 26, with a presentation by writer Devin Murphy, a 2002 St. Bonaventure graduate. Murphy, who earned his Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, will visit creative writing classes at St. Bonaventure prior to giving a free reading, open to all, at 5 p.m. in the Walsh Science Center amphitheater.

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