Oliver Baez Bendorf

Oliver Baez Bendorf was born on June 21, 1987,[1] in Iowa City, Iowa.[2] His poems sometimes feature the landscape of his childhood,[3] and his writing about returning to Iowa for a visit while transitioning genders was published in Buzzfeed.[4] He graduated with a BA from the University of Iowa in 2009. In 2013, he earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he met his teachers Lynda Barry,[5] Quan Barry, Amaud Jamaul Johnson, Jesse Lee Kercheval, and Ronald Wallace.[6] In 2015, he received an MA in Library and Information Studies, also from the University of Wisconsin-Madison,[7] where he worked with The Little Magazine Collection, one of the most extensive of its kind in the United States.[8][9] Bendorf is a fellow of the CantoMundo Poetry Workshop.

Bendorf's poetry publications include the book The Spectral Wilderness[10], selected by Mark Doty for the 2013 Stan & Tom Wick Poetry Prize, and released by Kent State University Press in 2015,[11] and Advantages of Being Evergreen, which was selected for the 2018 Open Book Poetry Competition from Cleveland State University Poetry Center and published in September 2019. [12] American poet Gabrielle Calvocoressi called Advantages of Being Evergreen "an essential book for our time and for all time" and wrote that "Baez Bendorf is making a future grammar for the moment all of our vessels are free and held. I am living for the world these poems anticipate… This is a book of the earth’s abiding wonder. And the body’s unbreakable ability to bloom."[13]

His third book of poems, Consider the Rooster, will be published by Nightboat Books in 2024.[14]

His work has appeared in publications including Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day,[15] American Poetry Review,[16] BOMB,[17] Black Warrior Review,[18] jubilat,[19] Poetry Magazine,[20] and Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics.[21] He has published essays[22] and comics poetry,[23] in addition to poetry, and his poetry has been translated into Russian by Dmitry Kuzmin.[24]

He has taught poetry and creative writing at University of Wisconsin-Madison, 826DC, Madison Public Library, District of Columbia Public Schools, Mount Holyoke College, Wick Poetry Center, Kalamazoo College,[25] Bread Loaf Environmental Writers' Conference,[26] and elsewhere.[27]

Bendorf is a transgender man, and has used his work to discuss gender identity and transition, sometimes in humorous ways.[28][29] He is of German, Southern Italian, and Puerto Rican (Afro-Taíno and Spanish) ancestry.[30]

In 2020, Bendorf was awarded the Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award from Publishing Triangle, presented to an LGBTQ writer who has shown exceptional talent and promise.[31][32] Bendorf was a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow.[33] In 2021, he joined the poetry faculty of the low-residency MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.[34] As of 2023, he is the Teen Librarian at Boulder Public Library.[35]

• 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry[36]
• 2020 Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award, Publishing Triangle[37]
• 2019 Rane Arroyo Chapbook Series Prize, Seven Kitchens Press[38]
• 2018 Open Book Poetry Competition, Cleveland State University Poetry Center[39]
• 2017-2018 Halls Emerging Artist Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing[40]
• 2015 New American Poets, Poetry Society of America. Selected by Natalie Diaz[41]
• 2013-14 Doug Fir Fiction Award, The Bear Deluxe. Selected by Lidia Yuknavitch[42]
• 2013 Stan & Tom Wick Poetry Prize, The Spectral Wilderness, Kent State University Press, 2015. Selected by Mark Doty[43]
• 2011-13 Martha Meier Renk Distinguished Graduate Fellowship in Poetry at University of Wisconsin-Madison[44]

• Poem: "I Just Chose My Place and Let the Circle Form Around Me". The Nation. 2021.[45]
• Poem: “Impervious”. The Cincinnati Review. 2020. [46]
• Poem: “River I Dream About”. American Poetry Review. 2020.[47]
• Poem: "Settler/Unsettled". BOMB Magazine. 2019.[48]
• Book: Advantages of Being Evergreen. Cleveland State University Poetry Center. 2019. ISBN 9781880834008.
• Book: The Spectral Wilderness: Poems. Kent State University Press. 2015. ISBN 9781606352113.