Freya Manfred's ten published books of poetry are: A Goldenrod Will Grow, Yellow Squash Woman, American Roads, Flesh and Blood (chapbook), My Only Home, Swimming With A Hundred Year Old Snapping Turtle, The Blue Dress (chapbook), Speak, Mother, Loon in Late November Water, and When I Was Young and Old.

Her poetry has also appeared in more than 100 reviews and magazines and over 40 anthologies. Her primary subjects are nature and human relationships.  Her work explores the mystery of dreams, love, longing, illness, and death. Poet Robert Bly says, "What I like in these poems is that they are not floating around in the air or the intellect. The body takes them in. They are brave. The reader and the writer meet each other in the body."  

She has received a Harvard/Radcliffe Fellow In Poetry Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, a Minnesota Poetry Award and a Tozer Foundation Award, and has has been a Resident Fellow at Yaddo, The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and The MacDowell Colony. Her half hour poem for television: THE MADWOMAN AND THE MASK, appeared on KTCA-TV, Channel 2, in 1991. 

Freya's first memoir, Frederick Manfred: A Daughter Remembers, was nominated for a Minnesota Book Award and an Iowa Historical Society Benjamin F. Shambaugh Award. Philip Roth says, "This rare book about the intimacy between a father and his daughter is notable for its affection, sensitivity, generosity, and gratitude.  In a larger sense, it is the revealing examination of an American writer's lifelong struggle with his material and with his cultural fate."  

Her second memoir, Raising Twins: A True Life Adventure, was released in 2015.

She conducts highly praised poetry and memoir workshops and readings for grades K-12, colleges, and adults. She lives in Stillwater with her husband, screenwriter Thomas Pope.  Their twin sons, Rowan and Bly Pope, are visual artists who have illustrated her last four books of poetry.