Eric Paul Shaffer

Eric Paul Shaffer lives in Kailua on O‘ahu.

Even Further West, his seventh book of poetry, was published by Unsolicited Press in 2018, and in December 2019, won a Ka Palapala Po‘okela Book Award from the Hawai‘i Book Publishers Association. A Million-Dollar Bill, another recent book, was published by Grayson Books in 2016. Other volumes include Lāhaina Noon (which also received a Ka Palapala Po‘okela Book Award); Portable Planet; Living at the Monastery, Working in the Kitchen; RattleSnake Rider; and kindling: Poems from Two Poets. Chapbooks include Restoring Lady Liberty; Road Sign Suite: Across America and Again; and Instant Mythology. More than 500 of his poems have been published in reviews, journals, and magazines in the USA, Australia, Canada, England, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Scotland, and Wales.

His novel Burn & Learn, or Memoirs of the Cenozoic Era was published in 2009. You Are Here and The Felony Stick, two chapbooks, were published previously and both contain selections from the novel.

Shaffer has been a featured writer at the Talking Gourds Poetry Festival, Cedarville University, Maui Literary Circles Reading Festival, University of Wisconsin: Wausau, Kentucky Country Day School, Leeward Community College, Yongsan Airbase in Korea, UH-Mānoa, and Hawai‘i Pacific University, and is a frequent guest to panels at the Hawai‘i Book and Music Festival. He was a Visiting Poetry Faculty Member at the 2015 Jackson Hole Writers Conference. Since 2000, he has organized and performed at least one National Poetry Month Poetry Reading every year in libraries and bookstores on Maui and O‘ahu.

Known as "Reckless," he is a charter member of the "Ancient Order of the Fire Gigglers," an aggregation of writers including James Taylor III, John Kain, Kathryn Capels, Michael Adams, and members of the publishing collective known as Turkey Buzzard Press, named in admiration and celebration of the work of Lew Welch.

In 2002, Shaffer won the Elliot Cades Award for Literature, an endowed literary prize awarded annually to an established local writer in Hawai‘i. In 2006, he received a fellowship to the Fishtrap Summer Writers Workshop and Retreat; won the Rupert Hughes Writing Award for his novel-in-progress Six Ways Home; won an "Award of Excellence" for Lāhaina Noon (2006) and won "Honorable Mention" for Even Further West (2019) in the Ka Palapala Po‘okela Book Awards of the Hawai‘i Book Publishers Association. Nominated five times for a Pushcart Prize, Shaffer received a "Special Mention" in the 2007 Pushcart Prize anthology for "Officer, I Saw the Whole Thing," included in Lāhaina Noon. In 2009, for his poem "The Whistle," he won the 2009 James M. Vaughan Award for Poetry from Hawai‘i Pacific University. In 2010, his poem "A Boat of Bones" received first place in the Lorin Tar Gill Writing Competition sponsored by the National League of American PEN Women.

He is an avid fan of the blues, bad science fiction movies, horror novels, five-mile runs, Hawaiian language and culture, star-gazing, contemporary poetry, Nalu (a sixteen-pound cat), Kona, (a dog of nine pounds), and, most of all, his wife Veronica.