In addition to piecing together a few slim collections of her short fictions, Eliezra (pronounced Ellie-Ezra) Schaffzin is at work on a few longer literary projects. Among them, two novels: one concerns two teenage girls in love, college applications, Beethoven’s choral music, religious apocalypticism, and experimental aerial drones. The other is a fantastical story of the first American department stores; her early research for that project was supported by a fellowship at the New-York Historical Society (whose name is in fact hyphenated: see here).
Schaffzin is a recipient of the Calvino Prize for fabulist fiction, 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 (forthcoming as an Ethel Mini-Book: more on that soon!), was named a finalist in both the 2021 Masters Review Chapbook Open (selected by author Matt Bell) and the 2022 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.
Originally from Philadelphia, she earned a BA in Comparative Literature from Brown University and an MFA from the University of Florida, and she has taught writing at Harvard University and the Rhode Island School of Design.