UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Penn State University Libraries’ Open Publishing program has launched “The Book of Jobs: Poems About Work,” a new open access monograph edited by Erin Murphy, professor of English at Penn State Altoona and the 2026-27 Penn State Laureate.
Murphy conceptualized the anthology and worked with the editors of “ONE ART: a journal of poetry” to initially publish the works in a special issue. She received 3,600 submissions and chose 135 poems.
As Murphy writes in her introduction, the anthology features poems about jobs ranging from “coal miners to caregivers, farmers to flight attendants, union organizers to Uber drivers, engineers to exterminators, teachers to tech workers, artists to athletes, and doctors to dunking booth clowns,” adding that there are also poems about “the work of nonhumans — bees, voles, meerkats, birds, earthworms, donkeys, whales, dolphins and dogs — along with the natural world itself.”
Murphy notes that subjects include “unemployment, discrimination, incarceration, unsafe working conditions and chattel slavery” as well as “humor, tenderness, joy, pride, and appreciation for those who “show up/ again/ again/ again.” Murphy said she made a point of highlighting labor that often goes unseen, such as domestic labor, caregiving and parenting.
“In the egalitarian spirit of this project, it was important to me that ‘The Book of Jobs’ be free and accessible to all,” Murphy said.
The anthology is fully open access, published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 license, which allows for anyone to read, share and reuse the poems under the license terms, so long as there is appropriate attribution. The anthology has also been made digitially accessible both within the PDF version of the book and within the newly launched Manifold platform that hosts and displays Open Publishing’s e-books.
The anthology has received praise not only from esteemed writers but also from postal workers, bartenders, healthcare workers and flight attendants.
Postal worker Patrick Irwin calls the collection “outstanding” and says the poems “address the drudgery, humor, frustrations, triumphs and ultimately the dignity associated with work.”
Emily Miller, a hospital nurse practitioner who worked in a COVID ward during the pandemic, says she was moved by the poem “Good Friday, 2020” by emergency room physician Rachel Mallalieu, which captures the fear many healthcare workers experienced during that period.
Murphy hopes instructors will consider adopting the collection for courses in sociology, business, economics, human development and family studies, creative writing and literature. She is also confident that it will have broad appeal to general readers.
John Marsh, professor of English, department head at Penn State and editor of “You Work Tomorrow: An Anthology of Labor Poetry, 1929-41,” said he found the collection “absorbing and inspiring” and that “each poem offers a glimpse into a life that might otherwise remain in the dark. One closes the book overwhelmed by a sense of how humanity can come from the occasional inhumanity of work.”
Open Publishing, the open access imprint of the University Libraries, provides tools and support for Penn State-affiliated authors and groups to publish full-featured electronic scholarly journals, searchable annotated bibliographies and monographs using a variety of digital platforms. All publications are free to view online and download. Copyright is retained by the individual authors where possible or by the journals or sponsoring entity. Almost all its publications are licensed for use under a Creative Commons license.
For more information about the program, visit Open Publishing’s website or contact the University Libraries Open Publishing team at openpublishing@psu.edu.