She currently is a professor in the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

The daughter of an American father and a Filipina mother, Murray grew up in Australia, Pennsylvania, and the Philippines.

She also completed post-graduate study in fiction from the University of Texas at Austin in 1994.

She was also the fiction judge for the Drunken Boat's First Annual Panliterary Awards.

She is on the editorial board of the literary magazine The Common, based at Amherst College.