In addition to piecing together a few slim collections of her short fictions, Eliezra (pronounced Ellie-Ezra) Schaffzin (starts with sh, sounds a bit like Jackson…) is at work on several longer literary projects. The current preoccupation is a novel about a pair of teenage girls in love, college applications, Beethoven’s choral music, religious apocalypticism, and experimental aerial drones. Another novel, now in revision, is a fantastical story of the first American department stores; her early research for this project was supported by a fellowship at the New-York Historical Society (whose name is in fact hyphenated: see here). Her longer work-in-progress was selected for honorable mention by the Miami Book Fair’s 2025 Emerging Writer Fellowship and was recognized as a semi-finalist for the Key West Literary Seminars’ 2025 Emerging Writer Award.
Schaffzin is a recipient of the Calvino Prize for fabulist fiction and a Key West Literary Seminars writing residency, and her story “Seesaw” was selected as the second-place winner of the Virginia Woolf Award for Short Fiction. Her tiny collection of tiny tales, Tiny Creatures, published in July 2024 by Ethel Zine & Micro Press, was named a finalist in both the Masters Review Chapbook Open (selected by author Matt Bell) and the New Rivers Press Chapbook Contest, and one of its tiny stories (“Triptych: Little Deities”) was selected as the 2022 winner of the Los Angeles Review Award for Flash Fiction. Another of the collection’s stories, this one about a tiny tardigrade, was chosen as a finalist for the inaugural SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction, and Schaffzin was invited to guest edit at SmokeLong shortly afterward; you can read the Guest Editor interview here.
Born and raised in the extraordinary city of Philadelphia, she earned a BA in Comparative Literature from Brown University and an MFA from the University of Florida. She has taught writing at Harvard University and the Rhode Island School of Design.
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Summer 2024 News:
If you happen to be in Philly on Sunday, August 18, come on over to A Novel Idea bookstore on East Passyunk at 3pm for the official launch of Tiny Creatures, published this summer by Ethel Zine & Micro Press. Four Philly-based Ethel authors will also read from their work, lots of beautiful Ethel books will be on display (and available for purchase), and the whole event will take place amid a menagerie of papier mâché creations by Tiny Creatures illustrator Stephen Schaffzin. You can also pick up a copy of Stephen’s new title for quirky kids (of all ages), A Cownting Book. (Have a look inside here!)