In 2026, the Academy of American Poets invited twelve poets to each curate a month of poems. In this short Q&A, Oliver Baez Bendorf discusses his curatorial approach and his own creative work.

Poets.org: Welcome to the Guest Editor Q&A hosted by the Academy of American Poets. I’m Mary Sutton, editorial director at the Academy, and I’m here today with the Guest Editor for July, Oliver Baez Bendorf. Oliver is the author, most recently, of Consider the Rooster. Oliver, welcome and thank you for joining me today.

Oliver Baez Bendorf: Thank you, Mary. It is a pleasure.

Poets.org: Let’s jump right in. How did you approach curating Poem-a-Day for July?

Baez Bendorf: The curation began shortly after I entered exile, and my leaving was an urgent response to external safety threats and a hostile political environment. And from that profound shift in my own life, I was seeking a shared frequency, and I wanted to assemble the voices that I most wanted and needed to be reading. So I focused first on legendary voices from throughout the Americas, including Circe Maia, Diana Bellessi, Elvira Hernández, and Cecilia Vicuña. And I built the month from there, and it was informed by my own border crossing, my own experience of entering exile. But at the same time, exile takes many forms and I decided it was crucial to include voices like Bellessi, like Samuel Ace and Meg Day, to honor also internal exile—poets who didn’t necessarily leave their physical countries, but who have navigated, documented, resisted the tightening conditions of the state from within.

A third of the curation features poets in translation. And, you know, I’ve been thinking about translation itself as a kind of migration. These poets and poet-translators I’ve been working with, carrying a body of work across a linguistic border in order for that work to find a new home. And I am just so thrilled that we are presenting these in a bilingual format with the original and the translation sharing the same space. And as for the daybook, “daybook from exile,” which became my curatorial lens for this month, a daybook is a ledger for daily transactions. And so this daybook from exile is just that, for daily transactions and small gains. And it is a record of survival. And it became really throughout the process, a temporary shelter that we built together and now it travels through the atmosphere to reach others.

Poets.org: Now, if you could direct our readers and listeners to one poem or more than one poem on Poets.org that you haven’t curated, what would it be and why?

Baez Bendorf: “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved” by Nâzim Hikmet. And I have the book right here, listeners. I’m holding it to my chest right now. This poem was written in 1962 while he was in exile in Moscow. And I tried to pick a shorter poem, but I just, I kept coming back to this one. And for me, with this poem in particular, its length is part of the … it’s part of the whole thing. Its length is itself a documentary artifact of surviving intact. And in some ways I think of this poem as a perfect expression of what I have been calling “the impossible mathematics of exile.” It’s a phrase that I first used in a poem that I wrote in Spanish last year: “Cambié mi vida por mi vida. Esa es la matemática imposible del exilio.” “I traded my life for my life.” It’s the reality of losing the map of your home country and your life as you know it, but gaining even in astonishing detail, a new landscape, a new park, new ground under you, and a sense of being very alive to this world that you are still alive in. And Hikmet, for me, expresses this just so well as he sits on a train and records the astonishment of realizing he loves the clouds and the earth. And it reminds me also of James Baldwin fleeing to Paris in 1948 and writing about finally being able to see the sky as if for the first time. And for the exile, looking at the sky is a political reclamation of one’s own life.

Poets.org: I think you’ve already answered a question I was going to ask you and that question was, what did you learn from this experience of exile that you wish more people understood? And you’re certainly welcome to add to that, but I think ... So of course there are many different forms of migration and people migrate for different reasons, but very often when we talk about migration, it’s from this position, well, within the United States, I would say. These days it’s been from a position of hostility and jingoism, talking about people who supposedly do not belong here, but historically there’s also this notion of being exiled as you currently are. There’s also the notion of being an expatriate.

I’ve lived as an expatriate, and I know that that’s a very different experience from being an exile because when you’re an expatriate, in the back of your mind, you know that you can always return home, right? And that’s not the experience of being exiled. Is there anything else you wish more people knew about being exiled? Because I think in the minds of many people being exiled sounds like this very lonely and ostracizing experience, but you’re indicating that it doesn’t necessarily have to be.

Baez Bendorf: Thanks for those thoughts and that question. And, you know … what can I say except that exile is many things at one time … and full of contradiction in some ways. I mean, I’m proud to be an immigrant, and on a material level, I finally have the safety and the time and the quiet to write. I’m writing a lot without having to constantly look over my shoulder the way that I was in the U.S., which is exactly also what James Baldwin wrote about experiencing when he left. And now I’m immersing myself in a different language on a daily basis, has completely shattered the idea that, which was already tenuous as a poet, the idea that there’s only one single word for a thing has just been an incredibly generative space to create from, but all of it is side by side, you know, the profound griefs, really, and the sudden gifts of exile.

It’s all right there in the daily creative practice. And I am grateful for the kinship. It has brought me into a beautiful trans hemispheric community and I have received such a warm embrace from my local community here and through this curation as well. I am in constant conversation with others who are also writing from shifting geographies. And so exile is surprisingly a populated place, you know, like from these poets in July back to Ovid and so many in between.

I remember having this sense around this time last year when I entered exile and I just was, it’s like suddenly when something is on your radar and you start seeing it everywhere, I just became so aware of like, oh, so many of my favorite poets wrote from exile, including in some cases that I didn’t know about. And so it, a little bit, had this feeling of a party that I didn’t want to go to, but once I got there, I was like, oh, okay, okay. You know, I’m like, I am held by the company. And not only of others who are in exile or other poets from exile, but just really the total transnational solidarity. So without painting a silver lining on it, you know, I did what I had to do, and I am writing, and the griefs are enormous, but also I’m not alone. 

Poets.org: What are you reading now?

Baez Bendorf: Well, I lived among the, first I want to name these twenty-three poets whose work I got to live among for months and just really was held inside the shelter of their words. I am currently rereading Roque Raquel Salas Rivera’s new book Algarabía with a small group here in my apartment. We gather in the living room to eat stew and read the poems out loud, and it’s just a brilliant bilingual work. I am, as you know, keeping James Baldwin’s collected essays very close. I’ve been rereading one short story by an innovator of the uncanny and the domestic who lived on these shores long before me. And I’m reading the local news also. Reading as a practice more broadly. I’m reading the greens in the park and the speed of the clouds moving and the language on the signs and the streets.

Poets.org: And what are you working on now in your writing, teaching, and publishing life?

Baez Bendorf: I am currently developing a nonfiction book with visual elements titled “Field Notes from Exile.” I am revising a poetry manuscript, “My Earthly Dispossession,” revising it from this new vantage point. My daily practice is centered in my studio in The Studio in Exile. It’s a generative space where I host the online field notes workshop and offer one-on-one manuscript consultations. And since 2019, I’ve also facilitated The 100s, a virtual, weekly writing collective that is based around one hundred words at a time and there’s seven of us and we each have one day of the week. Mine has been Sunday for many years. And so yeah, so maintaining these community spaces, these shared practices is a significant part of my practice and how I stay grounded and maintain a now global collective practice working with other artists and writers.

Poets.org: Thank you so much, Oliver. This has been a really enriching conversation.

Baez Bendorf: My pleasure. Thank you so much, Mary.