Penn State Laureate Erin Murphy shares stories behind her poetry

YORK, Pa. — A grandfather’s lunchbox. A conversation in a laundromat. The words in a human resources manual. During her recent visit to Penn State York, Erin Murphy showed how each could be the beginning of a poem.

Murphy, professor of English at Penn State Altoona and the 2026-27 Penn State Laureate, shared poems, family stories and humor during “With These Hands: A Collaborative Poetry Experience.” She also invited students, faculty and staff to draw on their own memories and contribute lines to a University-wide poem she will assemble at the end of the academic year.

“I want for somebody who’s never read a poem before in their whole life to read my poems and be able to get something out of it,” Murphy said.

Robert Farrell, director of academic affairs and professor of biology at Penn State York, said those stories connected with the audience.

“It was a thrill welcoming Laureate Erin Murphy to campus,” Farrell said. “Everyone who attended her noontime presentation remarked that they enjoyed hearing about her work and how her family and shared experiences informed her poetic creativity.”

Murphy began with a story about sharing eclipse glasses with strangers. She and her husband had about three dozen pairs. Some people declined at first, thinking she was trying to sell something. Once others began looking through the glasses, curiosity spread. More than 100 people eventually took a turn.

She compared that experience to sharing poetry: helping people see something they might otherwise miss.

“But no special glasses are needed. You’re in luck,” Murphy said.

Many of the poems she read grew out of family experiences. In “Elegy for the Thirty-Year Career,” she recalled her grandfather’s work on an assembly line at a helicopter plant. His early mornings, metal lunchbox and habit of stopping to help stranded motorists gave listeners a sense of who he was.

Rather than simply describing him as a good man, Murphy explained, she let those details tell his story.

She also discussed poems about caring for her mother-in-law, a musician who lived to age 99. Murphy wanted to write about the demands of caregiving while remembering the life her mother-in-law had led before she needed that care.

“Caregivers are unsung heroes,” Murphy said.

Other poems began with less personal material. For her collection “Human Resources,” Murphy worked with human resources manuals, keeping some words and removing others to create erasure poems.

Throughout the presentation, she returned to the value of noticing details and choosing words carefully. Clear, concise writing, she said, matters in many fields, including health care, law and engineering.

Then she asked the York audience to pick up their pens.

The starting point was a list of jobs held by people they knew growing up: parents, grandparents, relatives and neighbors. Work inside the home counted, too. Participants did not need to begin with complete sentences or worry about rhyme.

“We all learned something from her as she was able to spark our innate abilities as writers,” Farrell said. “I was gratified that she had a number of engaging conversations with the students throughout the day.”

Murphy shared how the writing exercise prompted an audience member at an earlier campus visit to call his sister. Reflecting on their late father’s work, the siblings realized they had rarely talked about his job. That phone call became a longer conversation about their father and their memories of him. Those moments matter to Murphy as much as the lines she is collecting.

“Yes, there’s the project itself. There will be a poem at the end of it, but it’s about the process of writing it that I think is also great,” she said.

Upcoming visits are listed on Murphy’s Penn State Laureate events page.