Stephen E. Murphy has lived and traveled “south of the border” for decades. He enjoys long lasting friendships in Cuba, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Panama and El Salvador. He has held executive positions in the Bank Boston, Paramount Pictures, and the Inter-American Development Bank. For the first Bush administration, he was appointed Worldnet Television director U.S. Information Agency. Under President George W. Bush, he served as Regional Director, Inter-Americas, for the Peace Corps.
As a volunteer, he taught economics at Miami Jackson High School. The Miami Herald and the Wall Street Journal recognized his efforts to teach inner city students about the stock market and how their picks beat the S&P 500 in 1995. He left Miami for hometown Seattle, where he has taught “Latin America Business” at Seattle University and consulted for firms expanding to the Americas. He has published articles on Cuba and Brazil for the Puget Sound Business Journal and for Seattle’s Trade Development Alliance Quarterly.
Murphy mentors students and young professionals in Miami, Seattle, Havana and Rio de Janeiro and serves as chapter advisor to the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity, University of Washington. He loves swimming in open bodies of water all over the world.
Encouraged by UW alumni, he self-published a 2016 memoir, On the Edge: An Odyssey, about “the turning points in life.” In 2020, Murphyinitiated the Professor Luke Shannon series inHavana Odyssey,telling why the Castroshad Cuba’s “Hero of the Republic” shot while his ghost still haunted the land.InBrazilian Odyssey(2022), Professor Shannon joins sixteen “unsung heroes” battling to save Brazil’s rainforests, indigenous people and fragile democracy against the powers that be.
The author has presented in three countries in 60 different venues, including Books & Books (Coral Gables, FL) Livraria de Vila (São Paulo)and La Biblioteca Nacional de Cuba.Murphy is researching a new book, Colombian Odyssey, and is fluent in Spanish, Portuguese and French.
