Penn State Altoona professor to be featured in ‘Badass Bluettes’ virtual reading

ALTOONA, Pa. — Penn State Altoona Professor of English Erin Murphy is among a quartet of women poets who will present a virtual reading of their works at 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday, April 24, via Zoom. Registration for the event is available online. The event is free and open to the public.

“The Badass Bluettes: An East Coast – West Coast Poetry Reading” will feature Lynne Thompson of Los Angeles, Susan Rich of Seattle, Mary Lou Buschi of New York, and Erin Murphy, professor of English at Penn State Altoona. Their respective new poetry book titles are “Blue on a Blue Palette,” “Blue Atlas,” “Blue Physics” and “Fluent in Blue.”

“We realized we all had 2024 poetry books with ‘blue’ in the title,” Murphy said. “So, we decided to lean into the blueness. By sharing our work collectively, we hope audience members will be able to appreciate how our critical perspectives converse with one another.”

Murphy explained that the name “Badass Bluettes” is a nod to famed jazz musician Dave Brubeck’s song “Bluette,” as well as to author Maggie Nelson’s seminal prose poetry collection “Bluets.”

“And of course we were also thinking of the Rockettes,” Murphy added.

The reading is being held during National Poetry Month, an annual celebration of the integral role of poets and poetry in our culture. A Q&A will follow the reading.

Erin Murphy is the author or editor more than a dozen books, most recently “Fluent in Blue” (2024). Her co-edited anthologies include “Bodies of Truth,” a collection of narrative medicine essays, and “Creating Nonfiction,” both of which won Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards. Her works have appeared in Rattle, Ecotone, Women's Studies Quarterly, Waxwing, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. Her awards include a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, The Normal School Poetry Prize, and a Best of the Net award. She is professor of English at Penn State Altoona and Penn State’s 2023-25 Mellon Academic Leadership Fellow.

Lynne Thompson was the fourth Poet Laureate for the City of Los Angeles. The daughter of Caribbean immigrants, she is the author of "Blue on a Blue Palette" (2024); “Fretwork” (2019), winner of the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize; “Start With A Small Guitar” (2013); and “Beg No Pardon” (2007), winner of the Perugia Press Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award. Thompson’s honors include the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award (poetry) and the Stephen Dunn Prize for Poetry as well as fellowships from the City of Los Angeles, Vermont Studio Center, and the Summer Literary Series in Kenya.

Susan Rich is the author of six books of poetry, most recently “Blue Atlas” (2024) and “Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems” (2022). She co-edited two prose anthologies, including “Demystifying the Manuscript: Essays and Interviews for Creating a Book of Poems” (2023). A recipient of Times Literary Supplement Award, she has received fellowships from Artists Trust, Seattle/King County, 4Culture, the Fulbright Foundation, and Peace Corps Writers. Her poems have been published in the Academy of American Poets: Poem-a-Day, Alaska Quarterly Review, New England Review, The Slowdown, and elsewhere. She lives in Seattle and teaches at Highline College.

Mary Lou Buschi’s collections of poetry are “Blue Physics” (Lily Poetry Review Books 2024), “Paddock” (2021), “Awful Baby” (2015), and three chapbooks. She holds a master of fine arts in poetry from Warren Wilson College and an master of science in urban education from Mercy College. Her poems have appeared in the journals Ploughshares, Indiana Review, Thrush, Rhino, The Laurel Review, and elsewhere. A nominee for Best New Poets 2014, she was a finalist for Best of The Net Anthology in 2014 and has received fellowships from the Santa Fe Writers Conference, Vermont Studio Center and the New York City Teaching Fellows. She is a special education teacher in the Bronx.

The event will be moderated by Megan Simpson, associate professor of English and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Penn State Altoona, where she coordinates the English program, the English composition program, and the African American Read-In. Simpson is the author of “Poetic Epistemologies: Gender and Knowing in Women’s Language-Oriented Writing.” Her scholarship on innovative poetry and poetics — including essays on Will Alexander, Harryette Mullen, Nathaniel Mackey, Mei Mei Berssenbrugge, and others — has been published in MELUS, Women’s Studies, College Literature, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Contemporary Literature, and elsewhere. Her poetry has appeared in Five Fingers Review, Transfer, Athena Incognito, Black Warrior Review, Ink, and The Reaper.