Eric Paul Shaffer is an American novelist and poet, who lives and works in Hawai‘i. A retired professor of English at Honolulu Community College,[1] he formerly taught at Maui Community College and the University of the Ryukyus on Okinawa.[2] His work has appeared in more than 650 national and international reviews, journals, and magazines, including Bamboo Ridge, the Chaminade Literary Review, the Chicago Review,[3] the Chiron Review, Slate, The Sun Magazine, and the North American Review,[4] as well as in the anthologies 100 Poets Against the War, The EcoPoetry Anthology, Jack London Is Dead: Contemporary Euro-American Poetry of Hawai‘i (And Some Stories), Crossing Lines, In the Trenches, Weatherings, and The Soul Unearthed.[5] He is the author of eight collections of poetry and one novel. Free Speech, a volume containing two poem sequences, Road Sign Suite: Across America and Again and Restoring Lady Liberty, will appear from Coyote Arts in 2025.
Shaffer is a graduate of the University of California, Davis, where he received a Ph.D. in American Literature in 1991.[6] Shaffer's dissertation was the first critical examination of the life and work of Lew Welch, a member of the San Francisco Renaissance and friend to Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Philip Whalen, Allen Ginsberg, Richard Brautigan, and Albert Saijo.
Shaffer received the Elliot Cades Award for Literature, Hawaii's highest literary honor, in 2002,[7] and the James Vaughan Award for Poetry in 2010.[8] He was a visiting poetry faculty member at the 23rd annual Jackson Hole Writers Conference. His poetry collection Lāhaina Noon received an Award for Excellence in the 2006 Ka Palapala Po'okela Book Awards.[9] His poetry collection Even Further West received an Honorable Mention in the 2019 Ka Palapala Po'okela Book Awards.