Oliver Baez Bendorf
Oliver Baez Bendorf is an American poet, essayist, scholar, and educator.Life
Oliver Baez Bendorf was born on June 21, 1987, in Iowa City, Iowa. 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, Quan Barry, Amaud Jamaul Johnson, Jesse Lee Kercheval, and Ronald Wallace. In 2015, he received an MA in Library and Information Studies, also from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he assisted with The Little Magazine Collection, one of the most extensive of its kind in the United States. 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.
His work has been featured in outlets including Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day, American Poetry Review, BOMB, Black Warrior Review, jubilat, Poetry Magazine, and Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics. He has published essays and comics poetry, in addition to poetry, and his poetry has been translated into Russian by Dmitry Kuzmin.
His debut full-length collection, The Spectral Wilderness, was selected by Mark Doty for the 2013 Stan & Tom Wick Poetry Prize, and released by Kent State University Press in 2015. 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.
Bendorf is a transgender man, and has used his work to discuss gender identity and transition, sometimes in humorous ways. He is of German, Southern Italian, and Puerto Rican ancestry.
He is an Assistant Professor of English at Kalamazoo College in Michigan. In 2019, Bendorf was announced as a faculty member at the 2019 Conference on Poetry at The Frost Place. 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.Awards and honors
- 2020 Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award, Publishing Triangle
- 2018 Open Book Poetry Competition, Cleveland State University Poetry Center
- 2017-2018 Halls Emerging Artist Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing
- 2016 Finalist, Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, The Publishing Triangle, for The Spectral Wilderness
- 2015 New American Poets, Poetry Society of America. Selected by Natalie Diaz
- 2013-14 Doug Fir Fiction Award, The Bear Deluxe. Selected by Lidia Yuknavitch
- 2013 Stan & Tom Wick Poetry Prize, The Spectral Wilderness, Kent State University Press, 2015. Selected by Mark Doty
- 2011-13 Martha Meier Renk Distinguished Graduate Fellowship in Poetry at University of Wisconsin-Madison
Works
- Book: Advantages of Being Evergreen. Cleveland State University Poetry Center. 2019..
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