About

Jeanne's education as a writer began in her native Ohio, where outstanding teachers of English helped her find her voice. At Allegheny College in Pennsylvania, she studied with the late novelist Alfred Kern and with Lloyd Michaels, founder of Film Criticism magazine. While developing as a fiction writer, she enrolled in the MFA program in fiction-writing at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Influential faculty at that time were Tamas Aczel, Jay Neugeboren,Joseph Langland, Robert Bagg, and James Tate. She learned from fellow students, too, like Marianne Boruch, Craig Lesley, and Dennis Finnell.
Jeanne landed a temporary job at Merriam-Webster Inc., researching word histories for the Ninth Collegiate Dictionary. She then started her 27-year career as a marketing and communications administrator at Westfield State College (now University). The campus was a hub of creativity, including readings by such accomplished faculty poets as Stephen Sossaman and Lori Desrosiers (editor of the fine journal Naugatuck River Review), and by visiting greats such as Desmond Egan, Hershman R. John, X. J. Kennedy, Galway Kinnell, and Richard Wilbur.

Jeanne and her husband, Tim Murphy, retired from their administrative work and moved to New Bern, North Carolina, which author Doris Betts called "the writingest state." The 12th annual Carolina Mountains Literary Festival invited Jeanne to be a featured reader in 2017. She also attended The High Road Festivals of Poetry and Short Fiction offered by Press 53. A member of the North Carolina Poetry Society, she also helped coordinate Carteret Writers and New Bern's former collective, Nexus Poets, and its monthly poetry open mic. Critiques with her writers group, Neuse River Writers, helped to shape her work.

Now Jeanne and Tim live in Maine. She is on the board of Maine Poets' Society and belongs to Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. She contributes book reviews to The Main Street Rag, a quarterly literary magazine out of Mint Hill, NC.

Jeanne likes to recall the words of Juan Ramone Jimenez (taped to poet Donald Junkins' office door at UMass): "Don't run, go slowly, / It is only to yourself that you have to go...."

See the "Quotations for Writers" page for more inspiration.

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