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 history 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 Seminar 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 have been awarded a Miami Individual Artists (MIA) Grant in support of my work on Don’t Mean A Thing, a narrative experiment that traces Fibonacci spirals through patterns in storytelling and in nature, traveling along arcs of extinction and imagination. (It also has something to do with Charlotte Brontë.)
Excited to be headed to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, joining a community of 22 writers, visual artists, and composers for a residency this spring! (The Center’s handbook boasts of the additional presence of Mt. San Angelo’s bovine residents but warns VCCA Fellows to stay away from the red bull, Trilogy.)