Jerome Ellison Murphy was born in Camp Darby, Italy, and grew up in Maryland and Pennsylvania. The recipient of an Acel Moore Career Development scholarship at The Philadelphia Inquirer, he studied at Stanford University, where he assisted Diane Middlebrook in researching Her Husband: Hughes and Plath, A Marriage (Viking, 2003). In 2011 he earned an MFA from the Creative Writing Program at New York University, where he currently serves as Undergraduate Programs Manager. He currently also serves as Consulting Editor for Park & Fine Literary and Media, working with agent Peter Knapp to support authors in bringing young adult and middle grade projects to their fullest storytelling potential.
Murphy's critical writing has been featured in The Yale Review, LA Review of Books, The Adroit Journal, Publishers Weekly, The Brooklyn Rail, Lambda Literary, American Poets and more. His poetry appears at LitHub, The Cortland Review, Narrative Magazine, Bellevue Literary Review, Spunk Arts Journal, and as he likes to say, "most frequently on the ceiling, as you lie awake at 4 a.m."
From March 2018-June 2020, with writers Tim Murphy and C. Quintana, Murphy co-founded and co-curated the Bespoke Reading Series, featuring such performers as Jericho Brown, Eileen Myles, Jonathan Vatner, Dréya St. Clair, Darrel Alejandro Holnes, and many more. From 2017-2021, Murphy served on the board of Poetry Well, the performance series and arts therapy organization directed by National Poetry Series winner Thomas Dooley, and from 2015-2017 served as a board member and Co-Chair of the New York Committee for Lambda Literary, the world's foremost non-profit supporting LGBTQ literature.
Short Bio
Jerome Ellison Murphy is a poet and critic based in New York City. He earned his MFA from the Creative Writing Program at New York University, where he currently serves as Undergraduate Programs Manager. His poetry appears or is forthcoming in LitHub, Poets.org Poem-a-Day, Narrative Magazine, Bellevue Literary Quarterly, The Cortlandt Review and elsewhere, and was recorded for NPR as part of the Poetry Well performance series. His critical writing has appeared in The Yale Review, LA Review of Books, Publishers Weekly, The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere.