Peter E. Murphy

Poet, Writer, accidental entrepreneur

Peter E. Murphy was born in Wales and grew up in New York where he managed a night club, operated heavy equipment and drove a taxi. He has been awarded six creative writing fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, which might be a record, as well as multiple residencies at Yaddo, The Atlantic Center for the Arts, The Millay Colony and other artist retreats. He has published eleven books and chapbooks of nonfiction and poetry with micro presses around the country.

Peter’s work has appeared in hundreds of journals, anthologies and textbooks including The New York Times, The Shakespeare Quarterly, Teachers & Writers Guide to Frederick Douglass, Commonweal, English Journal, Guernica, The New Welsh Reader and elsewhere. More than a dozen excerpts from his memoir in progress, Once Upon a Time You Lived in a Castle, have been published in the United States and in Great Britain. One excerpt was awarded the Arch Street Press First Chapter Memoir Prize and another, The Wilt Prize for Creative Nonfiction.

For more than forty years Peter has led hundreds of workshops for thousands of writers and teachers in the United States and abroad. He has been a consultant to The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Educational Testing Service, and countless school districts from coast to coast. Peter has also been an educational advisor to to three PBS television series on poetry with Bill Moyers. Peter has twice been recognized as a Distinguished Teacher by the White House Commission on Presidential Scholars in the Arts. After his second visit to the Rose Garden, Bill and Hillary Clinton added him to their Christmas card list.

Peter founded Murphy Writing Seminars to help writers develop their craft. He learned how to engage an audience by getting them to laugh at his stupid jokes. He also learned how to keep them coming back by creating a challenging and supportive community where they could mature as writers. His flagship program, The Annual Winter Poetry & Prose Getaway, grew from a weekend workshop with twenty participants in 1994 to one of the largest winter writing conferences, attracting more than 200 participants from around the world. Peter was surprised when Stockton University made an offer to acquire Murphy Writing and hire him and his staff to run it. It’s been a good match, and he plans to keep teaching writers to write until he drops.