Joe Wenderoth

Joe Wenderoth was born on June 29, 1966, in Baltimore, MD to his father Joe, Sr. and mother Kathryn Wenderoth. His father was a systems analyst and his mother was a nurse. He attended Loyola University Maryland, to obtain his Bachelor's degree in 1988. At New York University, he participated in a graduate study before deciding to earn his M.F.A. at Warren Wilson College in 1993.

He worked as an instructor in Creative Writing at New York University from 1990–91; an instructor in English at Harford Community College in 1993; an instructor in English at Catonsville Community College, from 1993–94; an instructor in English at Baltimore International Culinary College, Baltimore, MD, in 1995; Instructor at Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, from 1994-1995; and currently teaches in the creative writing graduate program at University of California, Davis. He also worked as a van driver and delivery person.

Bomb magazine characterizes his work as "uncomfortable honesty”, describing his poems as “bleak but always full-bodied in the experiences they channel.” Wenderoth's poetry aligns with themes of absurdity, vulgarity, and satire. His work has been called gritty, irreverent and witty by Publishers Weekly, often aided by his use of prose. He often utilizes these themes to discuss heavy topics of societal issues, faults within capitalist America and bureaucracy, and mental illness. Wenderoth's work has also been defined as seriocomic, which the Oxford dictionary defines “as combining the serious and the comic; serious in intention but jocular in manner, or vice versa.” He also consistently employs the theme of gallows humor throughout his work as he consistently utilizes humor in order to make fun of grim, disastrous, and terrifying situation. His work within the Inscription of the Seizure State is also credited at GIGANTIC magazine for “creating a new culture-agon that aims to unmire itself of poetry and convey how the poetic manifests itself in the SEIZURE of ourselves.” He often comments on the human experience, utilizing compressed vignettes about seemingly minor or preposterous issues that reveal desperate humanity. The Boston Review comments on his writing style, that it champions ridiculous possibilities of change that deride the United States culpabilities and hypocrisies In a review of Wenderoth’s poetry, poet Calvin Bedient commented that it "makes quick cuts in the meat of the ordinary, which is the meat of the impossible."

PloughShares, Spring 2001 Edition-Poet of The Accomplishment and At the Races

Letters to Wendy’s (Verse Press, 2000): In 2007, Wenderoth performed in collaboration with Gibby Haynes (of the Butthole Surfers) in Brooklyn at the Issue Project Room.

If I Don’t Breathe How Do I Sleep (Wave Books, 2014): No Real Light (Wave Books, 2007). It Is If I Speak (Wesleyan University Press, 2000) The Endearment (Short Line Editions, 1999) Disfortune (Wesleyan University Press, 1995)

The Holy Spirit of Life: Essays Written for John Ashcroft’s Secret Self