Erin Murphy is the author or editor of ten collections of poetry, two chapbooks, and three anthologies. She is credited with inventing the demi-sonnet, a 7-line form.
Her poetry books include Human Resources (forthcoming from Salmon Poetry); Fluent in Blue (April 2024); Taxonomies: Demi-Sonnets (2022); a chapbook of centos, Fields of Ache: Centos (2022), available for free PDF download from Ghost City Press; Assisted Living: Demi-Sonnets (2018), a collection of poems about caregiving, winner of the Brick Road Poetry Press Prize; the chapbook Remorse Code: Demi-Sonnets (Seven Kitchens Press, 2017), winner of the Keystone Chapbook Series competition; Ancilla (Lamar University Press, 2014), winner of the Womack Book Award; Distant Glitter (Word Poetry, 2013), a finalist for the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in Poetry; Word Problems: Demi-Sonnets (Word Poetry, 2011), winner of the Paterson Prize for Literary Excellence; Dislocation and Other Theories (Word Poetry, 2008), winner of the Paterson Prize for Literary Excellence; Too Much of This World (Mammoth Books, 2008), winner of the Anthony Piccione Poetry Prize; and Science of Desire (Word Poetry, 2004), a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize for the best poetry book of 2004.
She is co-editor with Todd Davis of Making Poems: Forty Poems with Commentary by the Poets (State University of New York Press, 2010); with Jen Hirt, she is co-editor of Creating Nonfiction: Twenty Essays and Interviews with the Writers (State University of New York Press, 2016), winner of the Gold Medal in the anthology category of the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards; and With Dinty W. Moore and Renée K. Nicholson, she is co-editor of Bodies of Truth: Personal Narratives on Illness, Disability, and Medicine (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), an anthology of narrative medicine essays which also won the Gold Medal in the anthology category of the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards.
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, The Normal School Poetry Prize judged by Nick Flynn, a Best of the Net award judged by Patricia Smith, the WISE Women Tribute Award in Arts & Letters, induction into the Blair County Arts Hall of Fame, and fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Maryland State Arts Council, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Institute for Arts and Humanities. Since 2022 she has served as Poet Laureate of Blair County, Pennsylvania. She is a 2023-2025 Mellon Academic Leadership Fellow.
Her work has been featured on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac, and her individual poems and creative nonfiction essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Rattle, Ecotone, Women’s Studies Quarterly, The Georgia Review, The Laurel Review, Field, Brevity, The Normal School, Contrary, subtropics, North American Review, Southern Indiana Review, The Best of Brevity (Rose Metal Press), 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, edited by Billy Collins (Random House), The Art of Losing, edited by Kevin Young (Bloomsbury), and the 2009 Best of the Net anthology, judged by Patricia Smith.
Murphy earned her Master of Fine Arts degree in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she was an M.F.A. Fellow and wrote her thesis under the direction of James Tate. She 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 Poetry Editor of The Summerset Review.