Derrick Austin & Oliver Baez Bendorf

press release: Helen C. White Hall, Room 6191

Poems by Derrick Austin: "Sleeping With Straight Boys" and "The Lost Woods as Elegy for Black Childhood"

Derrick Austin was born in Homestead, Florida, and is the 2016-2017 Ron Wallace Poetry Fellow at University of Wisconsin-Madison. A Cave Canem fellow, he is the author of Trouble the Water (BOA Editions), selected by Mary Szybist for the 2015 A Poulin Jr Prize. His work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2015, Image: A Journal of Arts and Religion, New England Review, Callaloo, Nimrod, Puerto Del Sol, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Michigan.  

Poems by Oliver Baez Bendorf: "Queer Facts About Vegetables" and "I Promised Her My Hands Wouldn't Get Any Larger"

Oliver Baez Bendorf is the author of The Spectral Wilderness (Kent State University Press), selected by Mark Doty for the 2015 Stan & Tom Wick Poetry Prize. He was the 2011-2013 Martha Meier Renk Graduate Fellow in Poetry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he earned an MFA in Poetry. His work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Blackbird, diode, Indiana Review, jubilat, Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, and elsewhere. Born and raised in Iowa, currently he lives and works on the road with Poetry Wagon, a 1961 Siesta camper.

Bendorf is leading a Poetry Comics workshop the previous day with the Borghesi-Mellon workshop series Applied Comics Kitchen. More info and (free, required) registration here:

Thanks to: Applied Comics Kitchen, English Department, and LGBT Campus Center for supporting these events.