Originally from the Pacific Northwest, Abby E. Murray has moved around the country and taught writing in Colorado, Georgia, Alaska, New York, and Washington, where she served as the 2019-2021 Poet Laureate for the city of Tacoma. Her first book, Hail and Farewell, won the 2019 Perugia Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Previous chapbooks include How to Be Married after Iraq (Finishing Line Press, 2018), Quick Draw: Poems from a Soldier’s Wife (Finishing Line Press, 2012) and Me and Coyote (Lost Horse Books, 2010).
Photo by Jennifer L. Miller
In 2016, Abby launched Collateral, a literary journal publishing work concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. She earned an MFA in Writing from Pacific University (Oregon) and her Ph.D. in English from Binghamton University (New York).
She teaches rhetoric in writing military strategy for U.S. Army War College fellows at the University of Washington, as well as poetry workshops at community centers, coffee shops, military posts, detention centers, shelters, and schools. Recent and forthcoming poems can be found in Prairie Schooner, Adroit Journal, Poets Reading the News, and the anthology We Got This: Solo Mom Stories of Grit, Heart, and Humor. Her poem “Asking for a Friend” won the Rhino Founder’s Prize in 2018. You can read more of her poems here.
When she’s too anxious to write, she bakes.