In addition to piecing together a few slim collections of her short fictions, Eliezra (pronounced Ellie-Ezra) Schaffzin (starts with sh, often heard as “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 and the 2025 UNO Press Publishing Lab Prize.
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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2026 News:
Grateful to report that I’ll be working on another long-form tale with support from a Miami Individual Artists Grant (MIA). The project, begun during my Key West Literary Seminar residency, traces a Fibonacci spiral around a missing lover’s fantastical (and perhaps true) story about the Caribbean monk seal, the “sea wolf,” declared extinct in 2008. (And it also has something to do with Charlotte Brontë.)