Writer
"The islands are even further west than I thought." ~overheard in Lāhaina
Eric Paul Shaffer is the author of eight books of poetry: Green Leaves: Selected & New Poems (2023); Even Further West (2018); A Million-Dollar Bill (2016; re-issued in 2024 by Coyote Arts); Lāhaina Noon (2005); Living at the Monastery, Working in the Kitchen (2001); Portable Planet (2000); RattleSnake Rider (1990); and Kindling: Poems from Two Poets (1988; with James Taylor III).
In 2025, Free Speech, a volume containing two poem sequences, Road Sign Suite: Across America and Again and Restoring Lady Liberty, will be published by Coyote Arts.
Photo by Mathew Ursua (http://blog.mathewursua.com/)
More than 650 of Shaffer's poems have been published in reviews, journals, and magazines throughout the USA, Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Scotland, Singapore, and Wales, including North American Review, RATTLE, Slate, and The Sun Magazine; Australia’s Cordite Poetry Review, Going Down Swinging, Island, Quadrant Magazine, and Westerly; Canada’s CV2, Dalhousie Review, The Fiddlehead, and Prairie Fire; Éire’s Poetry Ireland Review and Southword Journal; England’s Iota, Magma, and The Stand Magazine; and New Zealand’s Poetry NZ and Takahē. His work has been translated into Esperanto, Farsi, and Spanish.
His poems also appear in more than twenty-seven anthologies of poetry, including Fire and Rain: EcoPoetry of California (Scarlet Tanager, 2018), The EcoPoetry Anthology (Trinity UP, 2013), Jack London Is Dead: Contemporary Euro-American Poetry in Hawai‘i (Tinfish, 2013), 100 Poets Against the War (Salt, 2003), and The Soul Unearthed (Tarcher/ Putnam, 1996).
Shaffer’s first novel Burn & Learn, or Memoirs of the Cenozoic Era was published in 2009. His short fiction appears in Bakunin, Bamboo Ridge, Natural Bridge, and News from the Republic of Letters, and in two chapbooks, You Are Here (2004) and The Felony Stick (2006), both containing chapters selected from his novel.
Shaffer received Hawai‘i’s 2002 Elliot Cades Award for Literature to an established writer; a 2006 Ka Palapala Po‘okela Book Award for Lāhaina Noon (“Award of Excellence”); a 2019 Ka Palapala Po‘okela Book Award for Even Further West (“Honorable Mention”); the 2009 James M. Vaughan Award for Poetry for his poem “The Whistle,” which appears in A Million-Dollar Bill (2016); and the 2010 Loren Tarr Gill Award for Poetry (first place) for his poem "A Boat of Bones," which appears in Green Leaves (2023) and Even Further West (2018); and the 2020 Lorin Tarr Gill Writing Competition Awards for Nonfiction (first place) and for Poetry (third place).
Shaffer received a poetry fellowship to attend the 2006 Summer Fishtrap Writers Workshop. In 2013, Shaffer was the keynote speaker at Hawai‘i Pacific University’s 16th Annual Ko‘olau Writing Workshops, and in 2015, he was a visiting poetry faculty member at the 23rd Annual Jackson Hole Writers Conference in Wyoming. In 2024, Shaffer was invited to the University of Central Arkansas in Conway to visit classes and present a public reading from his work.
Shaffer lives on O‘ahu and is now retired from seventeen years of teaching composition, literature, and creative writing at Honolulu Community College.