Tom Murphy’s books: Pearl (FlowerSong Press 2020), American History (Slough Press, 2017), co-edited Stone Renga (Tail Feather, 2017). Murphy is Langdon Review’s 2021 Writer-In-Residence. Forthcoming work in Switchgrass Review, Langdon Review, Writing Texas, Locus Review, Corpus Christi Writers, Concho River Review, Good Cop/Bad Cop Anthology and Wine. Murphy has been named the 2021-2022 Corpus Christi Poet Laureate.

Check out Windward Review’s Author’s Spotlight on Tom Murphy

http://www.windward-review.com/authors-spotlight/tom-murphy

Windward Editors are pleased to highlight work from Tom Murphy's new gorgeous collection of poems, Pearl. Murphy is our fearless leader of the People's Poetry Festival, and a great teacher, friend, mentor, and supporter of our creative community in the Coastal Bend and Southwest region. The body of his poetry over the years, including his first volume, American History, is a searing indictment of tyranny, and an elegiacal treatise on love and loss. Particularly relevant now in the imminent face of fascism violently unfolding in our cities, as citizens protest police violence against black people, and the Black Lives Matter movement leads our fight for racial justice reform, Pearl joins this historic moment in illustrating our collective fight against erasure of our communities and human dignities in the face of corporate, oppressive forces. Of Pearl, Carol Coffee Reposa (Texas Poet Laureate, 2018) writes "Use of form and tone varies too, from haunting elegies, luxuriant prose poems and stream-of-consciousness meditations to sonnets, muscular villanelles and blistering social criticism: "You want to bring your guns to my class?/.… When the OK Corral breaks out, I'll be yelling, 'Kiss my ASS!'" His poems rise above confession and protest, though, to touch resounding chords of love and loss, despair and redemption. In his full-throttle search for the sacred, Tom Murphy ultimately maps the genome of the human heart, leaving readers the richer for his quest."