Sharon Murphy

Sharon Murphy was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the youngest of five daughters in a working-class Catholic family. As a child, she was certain that she would become a writer or a musician. But her mother insisted that being an artist was a goal for people with money—impractical for someone like her. Sharon followed her sisters to California, filled with dreams of liberation and rebellion. Sharon worked as a sales clerk, a waitress, a nurse’s aide, a community organizer, and a counselor for battered women. She sold advertising and worked for thirteen years as a paralegal. “I was a right-brained person trapped in a left-brained world.” Her mother’s words were still imbedded in her soul and writing remained just a hobby. Sharon was a member of Mothertongue Feminist Reader’s Theatre and performed her one and only rap song on KPFA, the public radio station in Berkeley, California. She was in her fifty’s before she decided to dust off her long-delayed dream of becoming a serious writer. “I spent my thirty’s running, my forty’s recovering; now it’s time to do what I wanted to do all along.”