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, the CLMP Firecracker Award, and the Lambda Award for Transgender Poetry, and was 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. 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 appeared in leading journals such as Poetry, American Poetry Review, and The Nation, and in major anthologies including The Best American Poetry and Latino Poetry: A Library of America Anthology. 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.

His honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and CantoMundo, and the Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award from 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 chose exile and is currently living, writing, and teaching somewhere on earth where the river meets the sea.