Background

Sheila E. Murphy was born in 1951, in Mishawaka, Indiana, to Thomas T. Murphy, dean of a university business school, and Bemadean F. Murphy, an educator and homemaker.

Education

In 1973, Murphy received a Bachelor of Arts in music and English from Nazareth College. In 1974, she received a Master of Arts in English from the University of Michigan, and a Ph.D. in educational management from Arizona State University in 1980.

Career

From 1974 to 1976, Murphy was an assistant professor of English in Escanaba, Michigan. Publishing her first chapbook, a collection of poems encouraged by friend and fellow poet Beverly Carver, in the early 1980s, Murphy also taught at the college level, and eventually earned her Ph.D. The move to Arizona State University to complete this advanced degree was key to Murphy’s career as a writer, for the southwestern culture and landscape has served to energize her creative talents.

Leaving academia in the early 1980s, Murphy has been able to balance her efforts at crafting poetry with a successful career in business, and has continued to maintain this balance throughout her adult life, finding success in both the poetic sphere and in the “world of work.” She reflects upon other creative individuals who have developed a similar life in her co-editorship of 1991’s The Literature of Work: Short Stories, Essays, and Poems by Men and Women of Business.

From 1980 to 1990, she was trainer, then training program director, then divisional vice president for Phoenix at AZ-based hotel chain. From 1990 to 1993, she was director of business and management programs at a university in Phoenix, and then, in 1993, she was a president of Sheila Murphy Associates.

Murphy’s first book of poems, With House Silence, was published by England’s Stride Publications in 1987. The same year, Murphy founded, together with Beverly Carver, Scottsdale Center for the Arts Poetry Series. She has also conducted poetry readings throughout the United States and Canada, and in Australia. A collection including poems previously published in Stride Magazine and other periodicals, the work was highly praised by critics. It would soon be followed by several other collections, among them Obeli: Twenty-one Contemplations and Tommy and Neil, a 1993 work that collects the sets of poems she wrote for her two younger brothers, Tommy and Neil Murphy, for their birthdays.

Over the past several years, Murphy has been working in visual art, particularly in the area of visual poetry. Her work has been exhibited and sold in multiple exhibits throughout the United States.

Achievements

• Sheila E. Murphy is known as both a successful businesswoman and a published poet. With several volumes and a host of chapbooks to her credit, Murphy has adopted an approach to her craft that is considered by many to be unique.
  
  Murphy was awarded the Gertrude Stein Award for her book Letters to Unfinished J. Green Integer Press in 2003, the Hay(na)ku Poetry Book Prize from Meritage Press and xPressed in 2017 for her book Reporting Live from You Know Where.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Indelible Occasion

    (THE INDELIBLE OCCASION marks the first appearance of thes...)

    2000
  • Falling in Love Falling in Love with You Syntax: Selected and New Poems

    (Sheila E. Murphy's selection gives readers access to a ra...)

    1997
  • With House Silence 1987
  • Criteria for Being Touched 1991
  • Sad Isn't the Color of the Dream 1991
  • Wind Topography 1992
  • Pure Mental Breath 1993
  • A Clove of Gender 1995
  • A Little Syncopy 1996
  • Leaflets 1998

Views

Quotations: “I hear language as another form of music. In fact, I enjoy what’s generally termed as language poetry because it is sometimes without apparent reference to anything outside itself.”

Personality

Music was Murphy’s first love and, although she began writing poetry while a teenager and even had poems accepted for publication, she considered her writing talents secondary and hid them under a host of pseudonyms.

Interests

• Playing the flute

Connections

Father:

Thomas T. Murphy

Mother:

Bemadean F. Murphy

collaborator:

Douglas Barbour

Born on March 21, 1940.

Douglas Barbour, poet, critic, and reviewer, is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Alberta, where he has taught creative writing, poetry, Canadian literature, twentieth century poetry and poetics, and science fiction and fantasy.

Partner:

Beverly Carver