Miguel Murphy

Instructor Biography:

M.F.A., author most recently of Shoreditch and two previous collections of poetry, Detainee and A Book Called Rats, winner of The Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry. Mr. Murphy’s poems and reviews appear in The American Poetry Review, Quarterly West and The Los Angeles Review, among others. He lives in Southern California where he serves as Professor of English at Santa Monica College, Instructor of Creative Writing for UCLA Extension and lecturer at UC Riverside’s Low Residency MFA Program.

Instructor Statement:

Literature is the place where I go to be more perfectly alone. The best writing, I think, comes from engaging questions of meaning and experience, while surprising with the rigors of syntax and form. We come together in the classroom to share ideas about how to craft our work into something that will reach another reader in another midnight. We’ll use class time both to have conversations about literature—as a model for how to develop our own writing—and to take part in a mutual excavation of each person’s unique aesthetic in the interest of developing our own individual voices. Together we’ll be daring and take calculated risks for our art.