Canadian Poets Series #18 : Gregory Betts

Gregory Betts is a poet and professor at Brock University and the author or editor of 25 books, including If Language (BookThug, 2005; 2008), Haikube (with Matt Donovan and Hallie Siegal; BookThug, 2006), The Others Raisd in Me (Pedlar Press, 2009; 2011), Psychic Geographies and Other Topics (Quattro Press, 2010), The Obvious Flap (with Gary Barwin; Book*hug, 2011), This is Importance: A Students’ Guide to Literature (Wolsak and Wynn, 2013), Boycott (Make Now Press, 2014), Sweet Forme: Shake-Speare’s Perfect Sonnets (Apothecary Press, 2020), Foundry (RedFoxPress, 2021), Dazzle Pods (with Art by Catherine Heard; Arts + Letters Press, 2021), The Fabulous Op (with Gary Barwin; Beir Bua Press, 2022; Downingfield Press, 2024), Bardcode (Penterac Press, 2024) and Muttertongue: What Is a Word in Utter Space (with Lillian Allen and Gary Barwin; Guernica Editions, 2025). Multiple interviews with Betts exist online, including by Jonathan Ball, at On Creative Writing, Buzdokuz, The Rusty Toque, by Richard Capener, and at The Ethically Immoral Podcast. His poems have been stenciled into the sidewalks of St. Catharines, hung on the walls of the Museum of Literature Ireland, and selected by the SETI Institute to be implanted into the surface of the moon. He has performed his poetry as such venues as the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games as part of the Cultural Olympiad, the National Library in Dublin, and the Sorbonne Université in Paris, amongst many others. He is an award-winning scholar of the Canadian avant-garde, curator of the bpNichol.ca Digital Archive, and Literary Arts Residency Lead at the SETI Institute.  He was a member of the Message Team and Advisory Group for Daniela de Paulis' SETI/Greenbank Observatory project, "A Sign in Space." Betts served as the Director of the Centre for Canadian Studies from 2011-2017 and was the founding Graduate Program Director of the Canadian and American Studies graduate program. He has taught Canadian Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg Universitat Mainz (2002-2003) and at the University College Dublin as the Craig Dobbin Professor of Canadian Studies (2018-2019). Since arriving in St. Catharines, he has organized 13 academic conference, 2 literary festivals, and hundreds of readings, talks, and other events.