Oliver Baez Bendorf

Oliver Baez Bendorf was born in Iowa and received a BA in English literature from the University of Iowa, an MFA in poetry, and an MA in library and information studies from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Baez Bendorf is the author of Consider the Rooster (Nightboat Books, 2024), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the CLMP Firecracker Award, and the Lambda Award for Transgender Poetry, and named a Best Poetry Book of 2024 by both Electric Literature and Literary Hub. His earlier collections are Advantages of Being Evergreen (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2019), winner of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Open Book Prize; and The Spectral Wilderness (Kent State University Press, 2015), selected by Mark Doty for the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize.

Baez Bendorf is also the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and CantoMundo, and the winner of the Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award from Publishing Triangle.

In 2025, facing political persecution in the United States, Baez Bendorf chose exile and now lives and writes by the sea.