Profile · West Bend, Wisconsin
Viola Sophia Wendt
Poet and Carroll College professor; raised in West Bend, taught in Waukesha
under $100,000 (1986$)
Viola Sophia Wendt was a poet and longtime English professor at Carroll College in Waukesha whose work won a Borestone Mountain award and still funds a campus writing scholarship. West Bend raised her; Waukesha kept the classroom; West Bend took her back for burial. Born on an Idaho farm in Boise on March 31, 1907, she moved to West Bend in 1914 when her father, Carl, left potatoes for a business. She graduated from West Bend High School in 1924, then earned a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where professors told her she had a talent for the bizarre—a judgment she took as a compliment. She never married. Carroll hired her in 1942, when wartime emptied classrooms of men. She became a full professor and, after retiring in 1975, stayed on as poet-in-residence. “On Reading Marianne Moore” took a 1955 Borestone Mountain Poetry Award. Her collections—You Keep Waiting for Geese (1975), The Wind is Rising (1979), and In Any Available Light (1983)—came from Carroll College Press and Bittern Press. She died in Waukesha on March 23, 1986, and is buried at Washington County Memorial Park in West Bend.