About Oliver
“One of his generation’s brightest lights.”
Oliver Baez Bendorf is a poet who collaborates with language to imagine new possibilities. His forthcoming book of poems is Consider the Rooster (Nightboat Books, September 10, 2024), which Brian Teare called “a visionary book of queer ecological thought.” He is the author of two previous books of poetry: Advantages of Being Evergreen (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2019), and The Spectral Wilderness (Kent State U.P., 2015), and a chapbook The Gospel According to X (Seven Kitchens Press), selected for the Rane Arroyo Chapbook Series. His work, noted for its rigorous compassion and innovative forms, has been recognized with a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Publishing Triangle Award, and fellowships from CantoMundo, Vermont Studio Center, Lambda Literary, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. His poems have been featured in publications like American Poetry Review, BOMB, The Nation, Orion, and POETRY Magazine, and across various anthologies including Best American Poetry, Latino Poetry: A New Anthology, and Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics. Since 2011, he has taught poetry writing to people of all ages, including at University of Wisconsin-Madison and Kalamazoo College, and through workshops across the country. He serves on the poetry faculty in the low-residency MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Born and raised in Iowa City, Iowa, he now lives along the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, in Colorado.
A shorter version
Oliver Baez Bendorf is the author of Consider the Rooster, forthcoming from Nightboat Books in September 2024, and two previous collections of poems: Advantages of Being Evergreen (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2019) and The Spectral Wilderness (Kent State U.P., 2015). He has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Publishing Triangle, CantoMundo, Lambda Literary, Vermont Studio Center, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Born and raised in Iowa, he now lives in Colorado.
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