Sheila E. Murphy is the recipient of the Gertrude Stein Award for her book Letters to Unfinished J. (Green Integer Press, 2003). Murphy's book titled Reporting Live from You Know Where (2018) won the Hay(na)Ku Poetry Book Prize Competition from Meritage Press (U.S.A.) and xPress(ed) (Finland). In 2020, Luna Bisonte Prods released Golden Milk. Broken Sleep Books brought out the book As If To Tempt the Diatonic Marvel from the Ivory (2018). Murphy has authored 44 previous books of poetry. Initially educated in instrumental and vocal music, she is associated with music in poetry. Murphy earns her living as a management consultant and researcher and holds the Ph.D. degree. She has lived in Phoenix, Arizona throughout her adult life.

Other poems on the web by Sheila E. Murphy:
"Vortextique"
Four poems
Five poems
"The State Tree of Arizona Is Littering the Walkways with Yellow Dust"
Three poems
Three poems
"Again"
"Displaced"
from Jazz Fingerings
Nine poems
"My New Blue Glasses"
Five poems

Sheila E. Murphy's Website.

About Permission to Relax:

"'Can an eraser be a dogma,' asks Sheila Murphy, in her new collection 'Permission to Relax', whose poems travel equally in composition and decomposition; they are as much about raveling as they are about unraveling. Here, the speakers 'unrest' in a 'colony of dogma'; they 'unbuild' houses and dreams and forms and lives and loves and joys and sorrows. These intricately constructed structures have an air of lightness about them, though mixed into that lightness is the existential angst of the quotidian rung with rhythmic grace and disjunctive virtuosity."
—Daniel Borzutsky

"Playful, philosophical, political, linguistically insightful–Sheila E Murphy's Permission to Relax takes the reader on a tour of Murphy's poetic range with hay(na)kus, ghazals, American haibuns, and open forms. Paratactic in one poem, narrative in the next, tonal, innovative, personal, collaborative, and visionary all in a collection that doesn't seem headed in the same direction while it is. These poems show the range of Murphy's poetic techniques and brilliance of her mind reveling in language and its refractions."
—William Allegrezza

"Sheila Murphy's arresting poetry in no way gives the reader permission to relax, however mellifluous and seductive it often is. Its playful syntax, startling imagery and polyphonic cadences and voices invigorate, reinvent and replenish language on each and every page, offering linguistic grace and absolution to those willing to engage and succumb."
—Rupert Loydell

"Pulsing between tight a lyric line and a longer, always musical semi-hexameter, Shelia Murphy's Permission to Relax echoes in form what infuses the content of so many of its poems: mortality, with its ironies, loss, inevitabilities, struggles, and glimmers of hope. The volume begs the reader to ask what relaxation means in such a context, and from whom permission would come. As such, Permission to Relax seems anchored in the history of that wrestling match, and its possible angelic counterforce."
—Dennis Phillips

"Sheila E. Murphy's poetry is highly perceptive, Argus-eyed, able to take in worlds of color, sound, imagery, abstraction & psychological phenomena as they occur on the spot. She sees through her fingers, listens with skin & eyes. Her ability to mesh thought & emotion highlights her poetics. Sheila demonstrates a formal skill that is breath-taking. She cultivates the ability to follow & breathe new life into such traditional forms as the haibun & villanelle. One of her chief skills is to create & layer new pathways of sense & intellect in the language of poetry. As William Blake would have it, Sheila E. Murphy's poetry belongs in the company of the Prolific."
—John Tritica