WILSON, N.C. —April 5, 2017 — Barton College will welcome author and poet Patrick Bizzaro for the upcoming Victor R. Small Writers Series Lecture on Tuesday, April 18. The lecture is scheduled for 7 p.m. in The Sam and Marjorie Ragan Writing Center on campus. This event is free and open to the public, and all are invited to attend.
Patrick Bizzaro has published 11 books and chapbooks of poetry, most recently “Poems of the Manassas Battlefield” from Mount Olive College Press and “Interruptions” from Finishing Line Press. To Bizzaro’s credit are two critical studies of Fred Chappell’s poetry and fiction with LSU Press, a book on the pedagogy of academic creative writing with NCTE, four textbooks, and a couple hundred poems, reviews and review essays in literary magazines. He has won the Madeline Sadin Award from “NYQ” and “Four Quarter’s” Poetry Prize as well as a Fulbright to visit South Africa during 2012.
The first Director of the University Writing Program at East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C., Bizzaro is a UNC Board of Governors Distinguished Professor for Teaching and ECU Scholar-Teacher Award winner. He recently retired as a full professor from Indiana University of Pennsylvania’s doctoral program in Composition and TESOL, after retiring in 2008 from ECU as Professor Emeritus of English. During his last year on the ECU faculty, Bizzaro received the “Outstanding Professor” award from the ECU Department of Disability Support Services, the ninth award for teaching he has received during his career.
His articles on Creative Writing Studies and composition have appeared regularly in “College English and College Composition and Communication.” His co-edited book on poet and pedagogue Wendy Bishop, “Composing Ourselves as Writer-Teacher-Writers,” was published spring 2011 by Hampton Press. Bizzaro is currently at work on a new book of poetry and a literary study, “The Rhetoric of the New Southern Writing.”
He makes his home with Resa Crane and their son, Antonio, in Indiana, Pa.
The Victor R. Small Writers Series is sponsored by the Department of English and Modern Languages in the School of Humanities at Barton College. For additional information, please contact Dr. Jim Clark, dean of the School of Humanities and Elizabeth H. Jordan Endowed Chair for Southern Literature, at (252) 399-6450 or jclark@barton.edu.
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