3rd Year Student Profile: Robert Alan Wendeborn

Robert Alan Wendeborn is a third year MFA poetry student from Aztec, a small town in Northern New Mexico.  He was awarded a fellowship from the Las Cruces Organization of the Literary Arts last November to write in Tuscany over the summer in 2010.  It was an amazing opportunity for him and he’s very grateful.  He feels like his thesis is a million times better for it.  

Robert at his public reading, 9/10/10

Robert is currently an intern for Professor Richard Greenfield's small press, Apostrophe Books.  He finds working with a small press incredibly helpful as a writer.  Robert says of the experience, “every time I work on something for the press I feel like I'm doing something to make me a better writer and poet.”  He is working on typesetting the new book and getting ready to help promote it as well.  He is also currently a poetry editor for Puerto del Sol.  He loves his co-workers at PDS and thinks they are the reason PDS is so cool.

His thesis, tentatively titled I Versus You (There Is No ‘I’ In Mouth, s-k-I-n, and Skin & Mouth Disease are also being considered (he needs help)), is a series of poems that explore gender and identity through the deconstruction of relationships.  Some of his older poems can be found online, though most of those won't be in his thesis.  Works from I Versus You can be found at Strange-Machine.com and others are forthcoming in the October issue of PANK, and the next issue of M Review, both online literary journals.

His interests outside of poetry include food, cooking, biking, traveling, commercials, body art/modification and fashion.  After he graduates, he hopes to attend a Phd program in creative writing or move to Detroit to teach high school/plant a garden.