ST. BONAVENTURE, N.Y. — Four poets will visit campus over the next three weeks as part of the Fall Visiting Poets Series at St. Bonaventure University.
Danielle Pafunda and Dale Martin Smith are coming Tuesday, and Hannah Brooks-Motl and Dan Bevacqua will visit Nov. 4. Both readings begin at 5 p.m. in the Reilly Center Hall of Fame, with a reception to follow. They are free and open to the public.
The readings are sponsored by the Visiting Scholars Committee, Damietta Center for Multicultural Student Affairs, and the Department of English. English professors Dr. Sara Nicholson and Dr. Kaplan Harris organized the series, which will continue in the spring semester with visits from poets Wendy Trevino, Trisha Low and Jennifer Moxley.
Pafunda is the author of nine books of poetry: “Pretty Young Thing” (Soft Skull Press), “My Zorba” (Bloof Books), “Iatrogenic” (Noemi Press), “Natural History Rape Museum” (Bloof Books), “Manhater” (Dusie Press), “The Dead Girls Speak in Unison” (Bloof Books), “Beshrew” (Dusie Press) and “Spite” (forthcoming from Ahsahta Press).
She is also the author of one book of prose, “The Book of Scab” (Ricochet Editions). Her writing has appeared in a number of journals, anthologies and projects, including Best American Poetry, the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day and Best American Experimental Writing. She sat two terms on the working board of directors of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and teaches at Rochester Institute of Technology.
Smith is the author of six books of poetry, including “American Rambler” (2000), “Black Stone” (2007), “Slow Poetry in America” (2014) and “Sons” (2017). In addition to writing poetry, Smith has published essays in Boston Review, Jacket and Jacket 2, Lambda Literary, Los Angeles Review of Books, Paideuma, and Poetry. With the late Robert Bertholf, Smith recently edited “An Open Map: The Correspondence of Robert Duncan” and “Charles Olson and Imagining Persons: Robert Duncan’s Lectures on Charles Olson” (both 2017).
Smith directs the undergraduate program for the faculty of English at Ryerson University in Toronto.
Brooks-Motl is the author of the poetry collections “The New Years” (Rescue Press, 2014), “M” (Song Cave, 2015) and “Earth” (Song Cave, 2019). Her poems, essays and scholarship have appeared in the Best American Experimental Writing, the Cambridge Literary Review, Modernism/modernity and in edited collections, among other places.
She earned a master of fine arts from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a doctorate at the University of Chicago, where she was poetry editor of the Chicago Review. She is an assistant editor at Lever Press and Amherst College Press.
Bevacqua was born in New Jersey and grew up in Vermont. He earned his master of fine arts from Columbia University’s School of the Arts. His short stories have been published in The Literary Review, Electric Literature and The Best American Mystery Stories.
He is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Western New England University. His first novel, “Molly Bit,” will be published by Simon and Schuster in February 2020.
Readings from the SBU Visiting Poets Series are archived on PennSound: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/St-Bonaventure.php
