Meet Peter

Peter E. Murphy is the author of a dozen books and chapbooks of poetry and prose including A Tipsy Fairy Tale, A Coming of Age Memoir of Alcohol and Redemption about growing up in Wales and New York City. The founder of Murphy Writing of Stockton University based in Atlantic City, he leads writing workshops around the US and in Europe.

Extended Bio

Peter 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 a dozen books and chapbooks of nonfiction and poetry including A Tipsy Fairy Tale: A Coming of Age Memoir of Alcohol and Redemption, published by McFarland Books.

Peter’s work has appeared in hundreds of journals, anthologies and textbooks including The Sun, The Shakespeare Quarterly, Teachers & Writers Guide to Frederick Douglass, The Michigan Quarterly Review, English Journal, Guernica, Harpur Palate, The Literary Review and The New Welsh Reader. More than a dozen excerpts from A Tipsy Fairy Tale 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, Arts Horizons, AtlantiCare Health System, The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, The New Jersey Councils for the Arts and the Humanities, The New Jersey Department of Education, Philadelphia Arts in Education Partnership, Virtua Health System and countless school districts from coast to coast. In addition, Peter has been an educational advisor to three PBS television programs on poetry produced by Bill Moyers.

Fun Fact: After his second visit to the Rose Garden where he was recognized as a Distinguished Teacher by the White House Commission on Presidential Scholars in the Arts, Bill and Hillary Clinton added Peter to their Christmas card list.

Peter founded Murphy Writing 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. In 2014 Stockton University acquired Murphy Writing and hired Peter and his staff to run it. It’s a good match, and he plans to keep teaching writers to write until he drops.