His doctoral thesis (York University, 2005) and articles in scholarly journals consider the radical (and mystical) poetics of Bertram Brooker, Canada’s first abstract painter, and winner of the first Governor-General’s Award for Literature. He is the editor of After Exile: A Raymond Knister Poetry Reader (2004), In the Ward: The Urban Poetry and Painting of Lawren Harris (2007), and The Wrong World: Selected Stories and Essays of Bertram Brooker (2009). Professor Betts is currently working on a critical edition of Sol Allen’s 1928 novel They Have Bodies for the Canadian Literature Collection at the University of Ottawa Press.