In addition to piecing together a collection 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, artificial intelligence, and experimental aerial drones; the other is a story of magic, seduction, and the first American department stores, for which she was awarded a research fellowship at the New-York Historical Society (whose name is in fact hyphenated: see here).
Schaffzin is a recipient of the Calvino Prize, awarded for a work of fiction “in the fabulist, experimental style of Italo Calvino,” and her story “Seesaw” was selected as the second-place winner of LitMag’s Virginia Woolf Award for Short Fiction. Her tiny collection of tiny tales, Tiny Creatures, was named a 2022 finalist in both the New Rivers Press Chapbook Contest and the Masters Review Chapbook Open, and one of its tiny stories (“Triptych: Little Deities”) was named 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 selected 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.