About Ingrid Wendt

Biography – Professional Experience – Awards – Community Service – Foreign Travel & Teaching

Biography

Ingrid Wendt is the author of five books of poems, a book-length teaching guide, one chapbook, and numerous articles and reviews. Co-editor of two anthologies—In Her Own Image: Women Working in the Arts and From Here We Speak: An Anthology of Oregon Poetry—Ingrid’s poetry and prose appear in such magazines and anthologies as Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Antioch Review, CALYX, Terrain, Beloit Poetry Journal, No More Masks! An Anthology of 20th Century American Women Poets, and many more.

Among her many distinctions are the Oregon Book Award, the D.H. Lawrence Award, grants from Oregon Literary Arts and the Oregon Arts Commission, the Editions Prize and the Yellowglen Award from WordTech Editions, many Pushcart nominations, and the Carolyn Kizer Award. She has opened a session of the Oregon State Legislature with a poem, and three of her poems have been read on National Public Radio by Garrison Keillor of “The Writer’s Almanac.”

A certified scuba diver, birdwatcher, an amateur photographer, and a student of languages, Ingrid has taught literature and poetry writing at all educational levels, in hundreds of public-school classrooms, grades K-12, in Oregon, Washington, Utah, Illinois, Iowa, and in ESL classrooms in Germany and Italy.
She has served as Poet-in-Residence at several colleges in the upper Midwest and has given many dozens of readings across the US and overseas.

A three-time Fulbright Professor at the Universities of Frankfurt/Main and Freiburg, Germany, Ingrid has taught in the MFA program of Antioch University Los Angeles. Writing residencies and professional travels have given her opportunities to live for one month or more in Mexico, Germany, Italy, Norway, Spain, Great Britain, Utah, Indiana, New Mexico, and Washington State. She has twice traveled to Chile, where she was an exchange student for three months in 1964. Her Spanish ability allows her to teach poetry writing in bilingual classrooms, volunteer as a translator for the AARP tax services program, and to work one-on-one with Spanish-speaking students.

A popular keynote speaker at educational, writing, and international conferences, Ingrid has given teacher-training workshops on poetry writing in the classroom throughout the United States, Germany, and Spain. She keynoted the opening of an International Studies Center at the University of Reading (UK) and a conference of the Oregon Council of Teachers of English. She has also taught sessions for National Writing Project institutes in Oregon, Washington, Utah, Oklahoma, and California. Her book Starting with Little Things: A Guide to Teaching Poetry in the Classroom, now in its sixth printing, is used by teachers throughout the United States and is distributed in Germany by Ernst Klett Schulbuchverlag, a leading publisher of educational materials.

Born and raised in Aurora, Illinois—of parents who had spoken German at home, as children (her father, in Valparaiso, Chile; her mother in Michigan)—Ingrid Wendt grew up studying piano and organ, climbing trees, asking too many questions, and wishing her school library would let her check out more than 4 books at a time. In high school she accompanied the choir, won several piano competitions, and was a (paid) church organist. Fully intending to follow a career in music, she couldn’t keep words out of her head, so she switched to English and graduated Magna Cum Laude from Cornell College, Iowa, where 40 years later she returned to receive the Distinguished Achievement Award from the college president and the alumni association. Ingrid’s MFA in poetry writing was from the University of Oregon, Eugene, where she was Managing Editor of Northwest Review.

Married for 48 years to the late poet and writer Ralph Salisbury, Ingrid has long considered herself a citizen of the world and an activist, whose passions are to protest injustice wherever she finds it and to celebrate and affirm whatever gives our lives beauty and meaning.

Music is still her main avocation. Since 1980 she has performed with local and regional choral groups, In Oregon, Utah, and Germany, most recently with the Eugene Symphony Chorus in a performance of Mozart’s “Requiem.” Mother of the poet and designer Martina Salisbury, grandmother to Gemma and Gavino Goette, Ingrid is fluent in Spanish and still speaks a bit of conversational German and Italian. She lives in Eugene, Oregon.

Professional Experience

Over 150 readings and presentations nationwide and overseas
Thirty years as visiting poet, grades K-12, hundreds of classrooms in Oregon, Washington, Utah, Illinois, Iowa, Germany
College and university guest lectureships and residencies
Antioch University MFA Program, Faculty
Senior Fulbright Professorship, University of Frankfurt, Germany
Fulbright Senior Specialist, University of Freiburg, Germany
College and university teaching: poetry writing, women’s studies, literature, composition

Awards, Grants, Honors (partial list)

Opened a session of the Oregon State Legislature with a poem
Oregon Book Award in poetry, for second book, Singing the Mozart Requiem
Yellowglen Award for third book, The Angle of Sharpest Ascending
Editions Prize for fourth book, Surgeonfish.
Three poems read by Garrison Keillor on “The Writer’s Almanac”
Evensong (fifth book of poems) nominated for the Pulitzer Prize
1st prize, Carolyn Kizer Poetry Award, Calapooya Collage, for “Double Rondeau in December”
1st prize for “The Mary Anderson Center,” essay, national competition: Alliance of Artists Communities.
Career Opportunity Grant, Oregon Arts Commission. Funding for travel expenses to give readings at 12 bookstores throughout Oregon and Washington,
to promote her 5th book of poems, Evensong.
Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship in Poetry, 2008. Funding to write a series of poems, based on her family heritage and her early years in Aurora, Illinois.
“Featured Poet” in Spring/Summer 2009 issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review.
Elected to the Fox Valley Arts Hall of Fame, April 2008, Geneva, Illinois.
Distinguished Achievement Award, Cornell College, 2006, given by college president and alumni association.

Community Service

Believing in the responsibility of writers to share their talents and to participate in the life of their communities, Ingrid Wendt has adjudicated literary contests and organized numerous poetry readings. Since 1982, she has been on the editorial board of Calyx, a Journal of Art and Literature by Women. Co-founder and past president of the Lane Literary Guild — a non-profit organization providing services and venues for local and regional writers — she has also served on the boards of directors of the Eugene Concert Choir and the Lane Arts Council. In 2003, and again in 2006, she directed the local campaign “Operation Paperback,” which collected and shipped over 5,000 used books to U.S. troops stationed overseas.

Foreign Travel and Teaching

Since 1983, Wendt has been offered numerous professional opportunities for international travel, teaching, as well as residence periods of one month or more, devoted to research and writing.

She has delivered a paper at an international writers’ festival, in Lahti, Finland; shared poems and conversation in what was once called Leningrad (1987) with Soviet poets, under the official auspices of the Soviet Writers’ Union; given a presentation at an international Native American studies symposium, hosted by the University of Valencia, Spain; lived for five weeks at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy; and spent other extended periods in Mexico, Chile, Great Britain, Italy, France, Norway, and Germany.

In 1994-95, Wendt was a senior Fulbright professor for two semesters, at the University of Frankfurt am Main, Germany, where she introduced semester-long courses in strategies for teaching poetry writing in the classroom for students in the departments of Education and American Studies. These classes were also attended by practicing high school teachers of English language.

During that year the Fulbright Commission, together with the Amerika Haus/USIS program, sent Ingrid to conduct half-day teacher education workshops, on the same topic, in ten cities in every part of Germany. In 1999, the publisher Ernst Klett Schulbuchverlag, distributor of her teaching guide, brought her back to Germany for more teacher workshops in Frankfurt. Also in 1999, the northwestern branch of the German teachers’ union sponsored her full-day teacher workshop in Stadthagen.

In addition to workshops, Ingrid has given poetry readings in numerous German cities and has visited upper-level high school English language classes in Freidrichsdorf, Frankfurt, Karlsruhe, Oberursel, Berlin, Germany and Padova, Italy.

Prior to giving poetry readings in Turin, Parma, Rome, Florence, and Venice, Italy, a bilingual (Italian-English) selection of Wendt’s second book of poems, Singing the Mozart Requiem, was published by Multimedia Editions, of Salerno, Italy, in 1995.

For six weeks in the summers of 2004 and 2005, Ingrid taught American Literature and Creative Writing for student teachers of English as a Second Language at the University of Education, Freiburg, Germany. This was part of the then-new Fulbright Senior Specialist Program, which pays visiting professors’ salaries and round-trip travel, with living expenses covered by host universities.

Through this program she is still available for future two- to six-week visiting scholar appointments, which can include teaching and/or visiting classes, lecturing, attending conferences, consulting, assisting with curriculum development, poetry readings, working with student publications, and so forth, in any country with a U.S. Fulbright office and staff.

The question sometimes arises: does Ingrid speak fluent German and Italian? The quick answer is no, though she’s taught in Spanish, within the U.S., and speaks enough German and Italian to make light conversation. All of her European presentations have been given in English, as are those given by most Fulbright professors and other Americans working beyond U.S. borders. University-schooled populations of most European countries, in Ingrid’s experience, are fluent in English—as are students from upper high school grades through university.

Ingrid Wendt CV

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