Erin Murphy is the author or editor of thirteen books, including Human Resources, forthcoming from Salmon Poetry; Fluent in Blue (April 2024); Taxonomies (2022), a collection of demi-sonnets, a form she devised; and Assisted Living (2018), poems about caregiving. In addition, her chapbooks include Fields of Ache, a collection of centos (2022). Her most recent co-edited anthologies are Bodies of Truth, a collection of narrative medicine essays (University of Nebraska Press), and Creating Nonfiction (SUNY Press), both of which won Gold Medals in the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards.
Her individual poems and creative nonfiction essays have appeared in Rattle, Ecotone, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Waxwing, The Georgia Review, The Laurel Review, Field, Brevity, The Normal School, Contrary, subtropics, North American Review, Southern Indiana Review, The Best of Brevity, 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day edited by Billy Collins, The Art of Losing edited by Kevin Young, The Writer’s Almanac, and elsewhere. Her awards include the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, the Rattle Poetry Prize Readers’ Choice Award, the Foley Poetry Award, the National Writers’ Union Poetry Award judged by Donald Hall, a Best of the Net award judged by Patricia Smith, and The Normal School Poetry Prize judged by Nick Flynn.
She received her Master of Fine Arts degree in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, under the direction of James Tate and is Professor of English at the Pennsylvania State University, Altoona College, where she has received the Athleen J. Stere Teaching Award, the Grace D. Long Faculty Excellence Award, and the university-wide Alumni Award for Excellence in Teaching. She serves as the Poetry Editor of The Summerset Review. In April 2022 she was named Poet Laureate of Blair County, Pennsylvania. She is a 2023-2025 Mellon Academic Leadership Fellow.