About Oliver
Biography
Oliver Baez Bendorf is an award-winning poet whose work explores themes of interconnectedness, transformation, and queer liberation. He is the author of Consider the Rooster (Nightboat Books, 2024), Advantages of Being Evergreen, and The Spectral Wilderness. His poems have appeared in publications such as The Nation, American Poetry Review, and Yale Review, and have been featured in anthologies like Latino Poetry and Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics. Recognized with a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Publishing Triangle Award, Oliver earned his BA from the University of Iowa and both an MFA in Poetry and an MA in Library and Information Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Born and raised in Iowa City, Iowa, he now resides along the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Published works
Consider the Rooster
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST POETRY COLLECTIONS OF 2024 BY LIT HUB AND ELECTRIC LITERATURE
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
Stay tuned.
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 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, Bendorf imagines a new world for all of our animal selves in which we are truly seen and truly safe.”