Herb Kauderer

is a retired Teamster (local 264), who somehow grew up to become an associate professor of English at Hilbert College. Along the way he's written an awful lot.

The first time I had to write a “pocket” bio to accompany a poem I had sold, it was a gas.  The next twenty-five times it was still kind of cool.  The fifty times after that, it was a non-descript chore to take care of.  During the course of the next several hundred times I came to hate it.  Now I have sufficient backlog to copy and paste.  Just saying...

I was primarily a factory working Teamster, although I have driven almost everything with wheels.  That includes at least once driving a tractor-trailer down the narrow windy stretch of the I-190 near Buffalo's baseball stadium and hockey arena.  Honestly I was terrified...

ANOTHER AFTERTHOUGHT:

So many amazing things have happened to me over the last twenty years, that it is sometimes difficult for me to process it all.  Many of them are private, but many more are public; things I dreamed of, but didn't really expect to happen.  And a lot did.  And one result is that my pocket bio now reads like something I might have invented in a daydream decades ago.  Here it is:

BIO:  ​Herb Kauderer is an associate professor of English at Hilbert College, holding a PhD, MFA, and five other college degrees.  He is the author of twenty-seven books, many of which are speculative poetry.  He is a past winner of the Asimov's Readers' Award (2016), the Critters Annual Readers Poll (2020),  and the Ewaipanoma Sonnet Contest (2008), has been a finalist for the Analog AnLab Readers' Award, and received Honorable Mention in The Year`s Best Fantasy and Horror.  He has collaboratively written a stage play, a feature film, and other, shorter, dramatic works.  He has had over eighty-five short stories and two thousand two hundred poems published.  His work has often been nominated for the Rhysling Award, the Elgin Award, the Dwarf Star Award, and the Pushcart Prize.  He visits Canada often.

It might be fair to say I wrote my way out of the factory.  The first college to hire me was intrigued by the 500 published poems noted on my resume.  That interview was in 1998.  There may have been a few poems more since then.

AFTERTHOUGHT:

When I started this website, I never expected it to get much traffic.  My life and career are scattered across the internet.  I was just trying to create a central and enduring repository of some of the things I've done that would be easily accessible to old friends.  Since then, two things have happened to surprise me.  The first is that this site has built up an inconsistent, but some times large traffic that has peaked at over 400 unique visitors a week and over 1000 page views in a week.  Other weeks might top at a dozen visitors.  I am amazed there are ever more than that.

The second thing is that "About" page has become the top hit when my name is Googled.  I had hoped the homepage of the site would become the top hit.  When it was this page instead, I considered how to change the page to represent myself more clearly.  After all, one friend jokingly asked if the photo at top was of my son.  Eventually, the "About" page did become the top hit.

Upon reflection I decided to simply add this afterword.  After all, we are always the accumulation of our experiences, and those of us privileged to get as old as me accumulate a lot.  The navigation bar at the top (or side in some smartphone views) leads to a lot of my experiences.  Thanks for stopping in.