About Oliver
Biography
Oliver Baez Bendorf is the author of three books of poetry, including Consider the Rooster (Nightboat Books, 2024), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and named one of the best poetry collections of the year by Electric Literature and Lit Hub.
His previous books are Advantages of Being Evergreen (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2019), winner of the CSU Open Book Prize, and The Spectral Wilderness (Kent State University Press, 2015), selected by Mark Doty for the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize and a finalist for the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. His chapbook The Gospel According to X was published by Seven Kitchens Press in 2019 as part of the Rane Arroyo Series.
His work has been published in Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Nation, BOMB, The Cincinnati Review, Poem-a-Day, New England Review, Orion, and in several anthologies, including The Best American Poetry, Latino Poetry: A Library of America Anthology, and Troubling the Line: Trans & Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics. His poems and essays have been translated into Russian and Spanish, and his work in hybrid forms includes poetry comics and a self-published zine on gender-affirming surgery.
He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, CantoMundo, Vermont Studio Center, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. In 2020, he was awarded the Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award by the Publishing Triangle. He has taught poetry and creative writing at institutions including Kalamazoo College, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Born in Iowa in 1987, he holds degrees from the University of Iowa and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2025, facing political persecution in the United States, he fled the country and is currently living and writing in exile.
Published works
Consider the Rooster
NAMED A BEST POETRY COLLECTION OF 2024 BY LIT HUB AND ELECTRIC LITERATURE
FINALIST FOR THE 2024 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD
Selected poems
“Impervious” — The Cincinnati Review
“All I Have Is the Woods Inside My Head” — Orion
“Nocturne” — The Slowdown
“Everything All at Once” — The Yale Review
Readings & events
Upcoming
Past
Oliver has read and taught poetry at events across the country, including The Word Is Change Bookstore in Brooklyn, Wesleyan University, and the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Workshop.
What readers are saying
“What gorgeous and ravenous rackets Oliver Baez Bendorf’s poems are made of; what a yearning and beautiful heart. ‘Lift a geode from the ground and crack me open,’ he writes, which is more or less what these poems do for me: break me open to what might sparkle and blaze, what might glisten and burn inside.”
“Oliver Baez Bendorf troubles the boundaries: of countries, of genders, of time periods. . . The wide range of forms in this collection, including prose poems, sestinas, and speculative ekphrasis, cement Baez Bendorf’s status as one of the most interesting poets working today.”
“Equal part prayer and potion and survival guide, Oliver Baez Bendorf’s remarkable Advantages of Being Evergreen is an essential book for our time and for all time. With rigorous compassion and great formal dexterity, Baez Bendorf imagines a new world for all of our animal selves in which we are truly seen and truly safe.”