13 Facts About Carol Bly

Carol Bly was an American teacher and an author of short stories, essays, and nonfiction works on writing.

Carol Bly was raised in Duluth and Tryon, North Carolina, where she was sent to live with one of her father's sisters because her mother had had tuberculosis and was often away from the family being treated in sanitariums.

Carol Bly never lost her preoccupation with the damage that evil people could do.

At the beginning of the next decade, Carol Bly was asked to write a monthly column, "A Letter from the Country" for the Minnesota Public Radio Magazine.

Carol Bly's work is in many ways an ethical treatise, often featuring a "bully", embodied by either a person or a corporation, who takes pleasure in forcing his will on another person or group of people.

The stories emphasize redemption through empathy, which, to Carol Bly, is the step of deliberately looking at how one's actions impact others.

The workshops were of limited size, usually including only eight students, with Carol Bly lecturing as well as providing individual advice and criticism of the student's works.

Carol Bly was awarded the 2001 Minnesota Humanities Award for Literature.

Carol Bly had previously been named the University of Minnesota Edelstein-Keller Distinguished Minnesota Author and the Minnesota Women's Press Favorite Woman Author.

Carol Bly was a member of the Minnesota Book and Literary Arts Building Authors' Advisory Group in 1999.

Carol Bly has designed workshops for Women Against Military Madness, National Association of Social Workers, and the Midwest Institute of School Social Workers, and was a consultant to the Land Stewardship Project from 1983 to 1992.

In 2003, Carol Bly donated to the University of Minnesota her correspondence, notes from writing workshops and classes she taught, and drafts of her works.

Carol Bly died of ovarian cancer on December 21,2007, aged 77, in Oakdale, Minnesota.