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, Beethoven’s choral music, religious apocalypticism, college applications, AI, 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 first 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 received her MFA from the University of Florida and lives in New England, where she has taught writing at Harvard University and the Rhode Island School of Design.