Erin Murphy, professor of English, has signed publication contracts for two new books: the anthology "I Witness: An Anthology of Documentary Poetry" and a collection of poetry titled "Fluent in Blue."
ALTOONA, Pa. — Erin Murphy, professor of English at Penn State Altoona, has signed publication contracts for two new books.
Wesleyan University Press will publish “I Witness: An Anthology of Documentary Poetry,” co-edited by Murphy and Kwoya Fagin Maples, a professor of creative writing at the University of Alabama. Documentary poetry uses material sources and/or personal experience to create persona, memoir, collage, graphic, cento and erasure poems.
“I Witness” will be Murphy’s fourth edited anthology. Two of her previous anthology projects, “Bodies of Truth: Personal Narratives on Illness, Disability, and Medicine” and “Creating Nonfiction: Twenty Essays and Interviews with the Writers,” have won Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards.
In addition to the anthology, Murphy has signed a contract to publish her 10th full-length collection of poetry, “Fluent in Blue,” with Grayson Books. More than two dozen individual poems from the collection have been published in such journals as “Rattle,” “North American Review,” “Diode,” “One Art: A Journal of Poetry” and “Waxwing.” One of the poems, “The Internet of Things,” received the $5,000 Rattle Poetry Prize Reader’s Choice Award.
Murphy is the Poet Laureate of Blair County and currently serves as Penn State’s inaugural Mellon Academic Leadership Fellow for the Big Ten Academic Alliance.
