Oliver Baez Bendorf (born 1987) is an American poet.
Early life and education
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.
Career
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]
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]