Erin Murphy is the 2026-27 Penn State Laureate. She is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including Swoon: New & Selected Poems (2026); Mother as Conjunction: Lyric Essays (2026); Human Resources (2025), documentary poems about labor and employment; Fluent in Blue (2024), winner of the 2025 American Book Fest Best Book Award for Poetry; Taxonomies (2022), a collection of demi-sonnets, a form she created; and Assisted Living (2018), poems about caregiving. In addition, her chapbooks include Fields of Ache, a collection of centos (2022). Her most recent edited anthologies are Bodies of Truth, a collection of narrative medicine essays (University of Nebraska Press), Creating Nonfiction (SUNY Press), both of which won Gold Medals in the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards, and The Book of Jobs: Poems About Work. An anthology of documentary poems, co-edited with Kwoya Fagin Maples, is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press.
Murphy’s areas of interest include poetry, creative nonfiction, docupoetics, centos, labor & employment, medical humanities, caregiving, the writing process, and humor. She has published 300+ individual poems and creative nonfiction essays in such journals as Ecotone, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Rattle, The Georgia Review, North American Review, The Best of Brevity, Best Microfiction 2024, and anthologies from Random House, Bloomsbury, and Bedford/St. Martin’s. Her awards include the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, the Paterson Prize for Literary Excellence, the American Book Fest Best Book Award, 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.
Murphy received her Master of Fine Arts degree in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 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 the Poetry Editor of The Summerset Review and Poet Laureate of Blair County, Pennsylvania. During 2023-2025, she was a Mellon Academic Leadership Fellow.
