Eric Paul Shaffer is author of nine volumes of poetry, most recently Green Leaves: Selected & New Poems and Free Speech, both from Coyote Arts. More than 650 of his poems have been published in Australia, Canada, Costa Rica, England, Germany, India, Iran, Ireland, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Scotland, Singapore, Wales, and the United States. A few have been translated into Esperanto, Farsi, or Spanish. His work appears in twenty-seven anthologies, including Fire and Rain: EcoPoetry of California (Scarlet Tanager,¿2018), The EcoPoetry Anthology (Trinity UP,¿2013),¿Jack London Is Dead: Contemporary Euro-American Poetry in Hawai'i (Tinfish, 2013), 100 Poets Against the War (Salt, 2003), and The Soul Unearthed (Tarcher/Putnam, 1996). Shaffer's first novel Burn & Learn, or Memoirs of the Cenozoic Era was published in 2009. Other fiction appears in Bakunin, Bamboo Ridge, Natural Bridge, and News from the Republic of Letters, and in two chapbooks, You Are Here (2004) and The Felony Stick (2006). Shaffer received Hawai'i's 2002 Elliot Cades Award for Literature to an established writer; Ka Palapala Po'okela Book Awards for L¿haina Noon (2006) and Even Further West (2019); the 2009 James M. Vaughan Award for Poetry; Lorin Tarr Gill Writing Competition Awards (Poetry, first place, 2010; Nonfiction, first place, 2020; Poetry, third place, 2020).

Shaffer received a poetry fellowship to attend the 2006 Summer Fishtrap Writers Workshop. In 2015, he was a visiting poetry faculty member at the 23rd Annual Jackson Hole Writers Conference in Wyoming, and has been a returning presenter, delivering the Keynote Address in 2013, at the Ko'olau Writers Workshops sponsored by Hawai'i Pacific University, a visiting poet and guest of The UCA School of Language & Literature and SLANT: A Journal of Poetry at the University of Central Arkansas in 2024, and keynote speaker and presenter at The Poets' Roundtable of Arkansas, the state affiliate member of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies, on Poetry Day 2025. Shaffer lives on the island of O'ahu.