Authors to give public readings during the 2012 Writers Series hosted by SBU’s Department of English

Several distinguished writers have made separate appearances at St. Bonaventure University this semester as part of the 2012 Writers Series, sponsored by St. Bonaventure’s Department of English and the School of Arts and Sciences.

 Each has given readings on campus, which were open to the public at no charge. The last of these scheduled authors appears tonight.

•             Thursday, April 19, 5:10 p.m., Dresser Auditorium, Murphy Professional Building: poet, editor, essayist and teacher Gregory Betts

 In addition, a relatively new writer on the literary landscape, Devin Murphy, who earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English from St. Bonaventure in 2002, will return to campus to visit creative writing classes and give a reading. Details of his visit will be announced at a later date.

 Other guests and activities, including a visit by a slam poet, will be announced as plans are developed, said Dr. Patrick Panzarella, English chair at St. Bonaventure.

Gregory 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.

 Devin Murphy, after graduating from St. Bonaventure, earned a master’s degree from Colorado State University and his Ph.D. in creating writing from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His writing awards include honorable mention in The Atlantic’s Student Writing Contest and third place in Glimmer Train Press, Inc.’s Short Story Contest for New Writers.

 His stories have appeared in The Missouri Review, South Dakota Review and The Greensboro Review.