Born and raised in Red Wing, Minnesota, Robert Hedin holds degrees from Luther College and the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. He is the author, translator, and editor of more than twenty-four books of poetry and prose, including At the Great Door of Morning: Selected Poems and Translations, The Dream We Carry: Selected and Last Poems of Olav H. Hauge (co-translated with Robert Bly), and Old Glory: American War Poems from the Revolutionary War to the War on Terrorism.
He has taught at Sheldon Jackson College in Sitka, Alaska, the Anchorage and Fairbanks campuses of the University of Alaska, St. Olaf College, and Wake Forest University, where he was Poet-in-Residence from 1980-1992. In 2001-2002, he served as the Edelstein-Keller Writer of Distinction at the University of Minnesota, a special chair in the Program of Creative Writing.
Robert Hedin is co-founder (with his wife, Carolyn) and former Executive Director of the Anderson Center at Tower View, the largest residential artist retreat in the Upper Midwest, and served as editor of the award-winning literary journal, Great River Review, from 1997-2015.
He has served on the writing faculties of the Pitzer College Writer’s Conference, Duke University Writers’ Conference, Eastern Kentucky Writers’ Conference, and others. He has been a consultant and literature panelist for various state arts agencies and national arts foundations, and has served as judge of the James Wright Poetry Prize, the John Haines Poetry Award, and the Randall Jarrell International Poetry Prize, among others.
He has read his poetry at many colleges, universities, and libraries throughout the country, including the Folger Shakespeare Library, California State University at Fresno, SUNY-Stony Brook, University of Nebraska-Omaha, University of North Dakota, and Western Washington University.
His poems and translations have been published in numerous journals, including American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, and Poetry, as well as in Good Poems (ed. Garrison Keillor), Poetry 180: Turning Back to Poetry (ed. Billy Collins), and other anthologies and textbooks.
Essays, interviews, and reviews have appeared in such journals as New England Review, Northwest Review, and Southern Review. His work has also been featured on Writer’s Almanac, National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, and in Ted Kooser’s nationally syndicated column, American Life in Poetry.
Robert Hedin’s papers are housed in the Upper Midwest Literary Archives, a division of the Archives and Special Collections of the Elmer L. Andersen Library at the University of Minnesota.