ST. BONAVENTURE - Several distinguished writers will make 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 will give readings on campus, which will be open to the public at no charge. The authors and their scheduled readings include:
5 p.m. Tuesday, March 6, Walsh Science Center amphitheater: poet, editor and ecocritic Jonathan Skinner
7 p.m. Wednesday, April 11, Garret Theater: poet, short-story writer and critic Peter Makuck
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.
Here's a look at the authors participating in 2012 Writers Series:
Jonathan Skinner's poetry collections include ''Birds of Tifft'' (BlazeVOX, 2011) and ''Political Cactus Poems'' (Palm Press, 2005). He founded and edits the journal ecopoetics (www.ecopoetics.org), which features creative-critical intersections between writing and ecology.
Skinner also writes ecocriticism on contemporary poetry and poetics. He has published essays on the poets Charles Olson, Ronald Johnson, Lorine Niedecker, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Bernadette Mayer, and on horizontal concepts such as the Third Landscape.
He is writing a book of investigative poems on the urban landscapes of Frederick Law Olmsted, the founder of American landscape architecture.
Skinner earned his Ph.D. in English (poetics) at the State University of New York at Buffalo and is a former assistant professor of environmental studies at Bates College in Maine. He is a 2011-12 Fellow with the Cornell Society for Humanities.
Peter Makuck is a distinguished professor emeritus of English at East Carolina University, where he was also the first distinguished professor of arts and sciences. In 1978, he founded the internationally acclaimed magazine Tar River Poetry.
His eighth volume of poetry, ''Long Lens: New & Selected Poems,'' was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize by its publisher, BOA Editions. His collection of short stories, ''Costly Habits,'' was nominated for the Pen/Faulkner Award, and he has five times received honorable mention in ''Best American Short Stories.''
Makuck's awards and honors include a Fulbright professorship in France, the Monroe Spears Award for the best essay to appear in the Sewanee Review in 2010, the Charity Randall Citation for poetry, and the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Award for best book of poems by a North Carolinian in 1989.
He has also been a lecturer in the Poets in Person series sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Makuck will spend two days on campus and will visit English classes prior to his April 10 reading.
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.