About Oliver
Photo credit: Jennifer Koskinen
Biography
Oliver Baez Bendorf is a poet whose work explores interconnectedness, transformation, and queer liberation across natural and human realms. He is the author of three collections of poetry, including Consider the Rooster (Nightboat Books, 2024), selected as a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in the The Nation, American Poetry Review, and Yale Review, as well as anthologies like Latino Poetry and Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics.
The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, CantoMundo, Lambda Literary, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, Oliver’s work has also earned him an award from The Publishing Triangle. Born and raised in Iowa, he holds an MFA in Poetry and an MA in Library and Information Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He now lives along the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, where he teaches in the low-residency MFA program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and continues to reimagine the possibilities of trans and queer poetics.
Published works
Consider the Rooster
FINALIST FOR THE 2024 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD
NAMED A BEST POETRY COLLECTION 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
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.”