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Born	William Bly Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Residence	Pátzcuaro, Michoacán, Mexico Alma mater	Allegheny College; Carnegie-Mellon University Parent(s)	William James Bly Jr.; Mary Jane Rex Bly Website	www.wedescend.com www.infomonger.com

Summary Statement Bill Bly (born 19??) is an American writer, teacher, and musician most well-known for his hypertext work, We Descend (1997).

Biography Early Life and Education Born in Pittsburgh, Bly grew up in Canonsburg, PA (Infomonger), an industrial suburb southwest of the Pittsburgh city center. He attended and graduated from Allegheny College in 1971 with a degree in drama. He then studied playwriting at Carnegie-Mellon, where he graduated with an MFA in 1974 (Amazon/CV).

Career Bly has taught university courses in drama, theater, and electronic literature for more than 20 years, first at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, and later at Fordham University, Wagner College, Kutztown University, and Northampton Community College (Amazon/CV/Pathfinders Book). He has also worked as a writing program coordinator, an managing editor for a literary journal, and an information architect with the New York City Distance Learning Collaborative (CV).

Bly purchased his first computer, a Macintosh SE, in 1988. Upon reading Robert Coover's "The End of Books" (1992), Bly began writing in hypertext (Pathfinders). Bly has published two hypertext projects, We Descend (1997) and We Descend Vol. 2 (2015), both of which take the form of fictional archival collections assembled by an unnamed archivist and "rendered into hypertext form" by Bly himself (We Descend Vol 2). These collections do not form a coherent structure, however they are connected through thematic, narrative, and hypertextual elements (Traversals book).

Bly's poems and stories have appeared in 5 AM, Amelia, American Poetry Anthology, Antigonish Review, Encore, Explorations '95, MacGuffin, Runes, Yahoo! Internet Life, and Zone 3. Other articles and reviews have appeared in Barron's Book Notes, sigWEB Newsletter, Books and Religion, Didaskalia, TDR, Tekka, and Trinity News (Pathfinders/Infomonger/CV).

The Bill Bly Collection of Electronic Literature is housed at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (Pathfinders and http://mith.umd.edu/research/bill-bly-collection/).

Selected Works and Awards Works We Descend: Archives Pertaining to Egderus Scriptor (Eastgate Systems) We Descend Vol. 2: New Selected Writing from Archives Pertaining to Egderus Scriptor (www.wedescend.com)

Music Media Ecology Unplugged (with John McDaid)(http://www.media-ecology.org/awards/mea_recipients.html)

Awards In 1982, Bly won the Stanley Drama Award for his play Jonas (Amazon). He received the John Culkin Award for Outstanding Praxis in the Field of Media Ecology (with John McDaid) in 2002 (Amazon/CV). He participated in the 1997 Ploughshares International Fiction Writing Seminar, as well as 2002 and 2003 Vermont Studio Center Residencies (Infomonger). He also received fellowships from the Shubert Foundation and the Empire State Institute for the Arts (Infomonger).

See also Eastgate Systems Hypertext Electronic Literature

We Descend Initial work for We Descend began in 1984, though Bly didn't purchase his first computer until 1988 (Infomonger). We Descend

Bly's "life's work" (Authoring Software) hypertext format...archive, fragments tells the story of

We Descend volume 1 was published by Eastgate Systems in 1997. We Descend Vol. 2 was released in beta version in ????. It was displayed at the Modern Language Association national convention in January 2013 and 2014 (Pathfinders).