Shaun Griffin's poetry embraces his deep convictions and concerns about the marginalized lives of the downtrodden and the hungry world-wide.
Shaun Griffin is the co-founder and director of Community Chest, a non-profit agency serving children and families in northwestern Nevada since 1991, and the former founding director of the state's homeless education office. Shaun has spent a lifetime trying to build bridges where there were none for all members of the human community. During the mid-80s he worked in Stanford University's foremost community outreach program, starting several disability initiatives on that campus. He later founded a minority youth outreach program for four universities in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2004, he received the Mike O'Callaghan Humanitarian Award, named after the former Nevada Governor.
His last book of poems was Bathing in the River of Ashes, published by the University of Nevada Press in 1999. Death to Silence (translations from the Chilean poet, Emma Sepúlveda) was released by Arte Público Press in 1997. In 1995 he received the Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts. For many years he has taught a poetry workshop at Northern Nevada Correctional Center and published an annual journal of their work, Razor Wire. He regularly contributes poetry, essays, and translations to literary journals in the West, and was editor-at-large at Calapooya and contributing editor at Weber Studies. He is finishing a memoir about a long journey with his family from Tokyo to Patagonia-- The House of a Thousand Arms.
He has lived in Nevada since 1978-- except for the four years when his wife was in graduate school in the Bay Area. He and his family live in Virginia City, at the western-most edge of the Great Basin.
