Erin C. Murphy

Erin Murphy, professor of English, has published more than a dozen books and 300+ works in peer-reviewed journals and anthologies from Random House, Bloomsbury, Bedford St. Martin’s, and numerous independent and university presses. Her research interests include poetry, nonfiction, and medical humanities. At Penn State, she has received the university-wide Alumni Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Athleen J. Stere Teaching Award, the Grace D. Long Faculty Excellence Award, and the inaugural Mellon Academic Leadership Fellow for the Big Ten Academic Alliance. She serves as Poet Laureate of Blair County (PA) and Poetry Editor of The Summerset Review.

Murphy’s collections of poetry include Human Resources (2025); Fluent in Blue (2024); Taxonomies (2022); Assisted Living, winner of the Brick Road Poetry Press Prize (2018); Ancilla (2014), winner of the Womack Book Award; Distant Glitter (2013), a finalist for the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in Poetry; Word Problems (2011), winner of the Paterson Prize for Literary Excellence; Dislocation and Other Theories (2008), winner of the Paterson Prize for Literary Excellence; Too Much of This World (2008), winner of the Anthony Piccione Poetry Prize; and Science of Desire (2004), a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize for the best poetry book of 2004. She has also authored two chapbooks: Fields of Ache (2023), available for a free download from Ghost City Press, and Remorse Code (2017), winner of the Keystone Chapbook Series competition sponsored by Seven Kitchens Press.

With Kwoya Fagin Maples, she is editing an anthology of docupoetics forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press; with Dinty W. Moore and Renée K. Nicholson, she edited Bodies of Truth: Personal Narratives on Illness, Disability, and Medicine (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), an anthology of narrative medicine essays which won the Gold Medal in the anthology category of the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards; with Jen Hirt, she edited Creating Nonfiction: Twenty Essays and Interviews with the Writers (State University of New York Press, 2016), which also won the Gold Medal in the anthology category of the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards; and with Todd Davis, she edited Making Poems: Forty Poems with Commentary by the Poets (State University of New York Press, 2010).

Her awards include the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, Best Microfiction 2024, the Rattle Poetry Prize Readers’ Choice Award, a Best of the Net Award, the Foley Poetry Award, the National Writers' Union Poetry Award judged by Donald Hall, The Normal School Poetry Prize judged by Nick Flynn, 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. Her poetry has been featured on Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac.

Murphy earned her bachelor’s degree in English with a philosophy minor from Washington College and 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.