Robert Bly

Norwegian-American author, poet, and activist Robert Bly was born in 1926 in Madison, Minnesota.

After spending two years in the U.S. Navy, Bly attended Harvard University and graduated in 1950. From 1954 to 1956, he studied at the University of Iowa in the Writers Workshop, before receiving a Fulbright Scholarship. The scholarship enabled him to travel to Norway and translate Norwegian poetry.

Bly’s first collection of poetry, Silence in the Snowy Fields, was published in 1962. Since then, he has published more than forty books, collections of poetry, and translations. In 1966, Bly co-founded American Writers Against the Vietnam War, and when his The Light Around the Body received the National Book Award in 1968, he contributed the prize money to the war resistance. His famed book Iron John: A Book About Men is credited with initiating the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement in the United States, a psychological self-help movement.

His works include: Remembering James Wright (2005), The Maiden King (co-written with Marion Woodman) (1998), The Sibling Society (1996), Talking into the Ear of a Donkey (2011), The Urge to Travel Long Distances (2005), My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy (2005), The Night Abraham Called to the Stars (2001), Eating the Honey of Words (1999), Morning Poems (1997), Meditations on the Insatiable Soul (1994) and a large collection Stealing Sugar from the Castle (2013).

In February 2008, Robert Bly became Minnesota’s first poet laureate, and he currently resides in the state.