Oliver Baez Bendorf

Oliver Baez Bendorf was born on June 21, 1987,[1] in Iowa City, Iowa.[2] He received a BA from the University of Iowa in 2009. In 2013, he completed an MFA in poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he met his teachers Lynda Barry,[3] Quan Barry, Amaud Jamaul Johnson, Jesse Lee Kercheval, and Ronald Wallace.[4] In 2015, he received an MA in Library and Information Studies, also from the University of Wisconsin-Madison,[5] where he assisted with The Little Magazine Collection, one of the most extensive of its kind in the United States.[6][7] Bendorf is a fellow of the CantoMundo Poetry Workshop.

He has taught poetry at a selection of institutions including University of Wisconsin-Madison, 826DC, Madison Public Library, District of Columbia Public Schools, Mount Holyoke College, Wick Poetry Center, and elsewhere.[8]

His work has been featured in outlets including Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day,[9] American Poetry Review,[10] BOMB,[11] Black Warrior Review,[12] jubilat,[13] Poetry Magazine,[14] and Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics.[15] He has published essays[16] and comics poetry,[17] in addition to poetry, and his poetry has been translated into Russian by Dmitry Kuzmin.[18]

His debut full-length collection, The Spectral Wilderness[19], was selected by Mark Doty for the 2013 Stan & Tom Wick Poetry Prize, and released by Kent State University Press in 2015.[20] His second collection, Advantages of Being Evergreen, was selected for the 2018 Open Book Poetry Competition from Cleveland State University Poetry Center, and was published in September 2019.[21]

Bendorf is a transgender man, and has used his work to discuss gender identity and transition, sometimes in humorous ways.[22][23] He is of German, Southern Italian, and Puerto Rican (Afro-Taíno and Spanish) ancestry.[24]

He is an Assistant Professor of English at Kalamazoo College in Michigan.[25] In 2019, Bendorf was announced as a faculty member at the 2019 Conference on Poetry at The Frost Place.[26] 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.[27][28]

• 2020 Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award, Publishing Triangle[29]
• 2018 Open Book Poetry Competition, Cleveland State University Poetry Center[30]
• 2017-2018 Halls Emerging Artist Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing[31]
• 2016 Finalist, Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, The Publishing Triangle, for The Spectral Wilderness[32]
• 2015 New American Poets, Poetry Society of America. Selected by Natalie Diaz[33]
• 2013-14 Doug Fir Fiction Award, The Bear Deluxe. Selected by Lidia Yuknavitch[34]
• 2013 Stan & Tom Wick Poetry Prize, The Spectral Wilderness, Kent State University Press, 2015. Selected by Mark Doty[35]
• 2011-13 Martha Meier Renk Distinguished Graduate Fellowship in Poetry at University of Wisconsin-Madison[36]

• 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.
• Poem: Bone Dust (Poetry)
• Poem: Settler/Unsettled (BOMB )
• Poem: ghost ship novena inside a year-long funeral (BOAAT Journal)
• Poem: Ritual (Black Warrior Review)
• Poem: Evergreen (Academy of American Poets)
• Visual poems: Folio (Adirondack Review)