Photo credit Katie O’Shea.
Robert Eric Shoemaker is a poet-playwright, educator, and theatre artist. Eric is an MFA Candidate in Naropa University’s Creative Writing & Poetics program at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.
Eric is the Founding Editor of Beats: A Naropan Periodical. Since its founding in response to the presidential election of November 2016, Beats has published 4 issues including 2 chapbooks and dozens of online pieces, and orchestrated two activist readings and one production at a major venue: “HOWL: A Ginsberg Birthday Party” at the Fox Theatre in Boulder. Over 20 acts performed at the Fox for this event for which Eric & Beats were the main producing entity. Beats received a $1000 grant from the Awesome Foundation to fund the “HOWL” production.
Eric is also the Founding Artistic Director of Poetry Is Productions, a theatre and arts company responsible for over four years of work in Chicago, New York, and Boulder. Several of Eric’s plays and work by other writers, including poet Catherine Theis, have been featured by Poetry Is. Eric is the author of the duet musical “PLATH/HUGHES”, which was awarded the 2014 Olga and Paul Menn Foundation Prize for Best Play and has been produced by Poetry Is throughout Chicago and in New York. His project “Lorca In America” was awarded a 2015 DCASE Individual Artist Program grant from the City of Chicago and featured the production of his original translation “Bernarda Alba and Her House” at Redtwist Theatre.
Eric’s poetry and plays have been featured in Columbia Journal; Water, Water Everywhere; Beats: A Naropan Periodical; Mosaic at University of California Riverside; Tooth N’ Nail; Rollick; Literature Emitting Diodes; Chicago After Dark; Thought Notebook; Baseball Bard; 2017’s Verde Qué Te Quiero Verde; and his debut collection 30 Days Dry from Thought Collection Publishing. Eric’s second book of poetry, We Knew No Mortality, is forthcoming from In Extenso Press/Acta Publications, with a third book of hybrid writing including an online component, Ca’Venezia and other tales, on the way from Partial Press, both in late 2017.
Eric’s journalism has been published in Turnout: A Poetic Journalism Zine; Boulder Weekly; Newcity; Evanston Now; Fra Noi Magazine; Artisan Magazine; Printeresting; VAM; and through the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting Campus Consortium Fellowship, which sent Eric to Venice to cover his project “Venetian Artisanship and Climate Change”.
Eric is a graduate with honors and a student marshal from the University of Chicago, where he was Artistic Director of the Classical Entertainment Society. He currently serves as a member of the University of Chicago Arts Alumni Board.
Follow his work at reshoemaker.com.
Contact Eric at <eric@reshoemaker.com>
INFLUENCES and FAVORITES: Edward Albee and “A Delicate Balance”, E. E. Cummings and “The Enormous Room”, Ted Hughes and “Birthday Letters”, Federico Garcia Lorca and “The Theory and Play of Duende”, Jeffrey Eugenides and “Middlesex”, Darren Aronofsky and “Requiem for a Dream”, Anne Carson and “An Oresteia”, Christian Bök and “Crystallography”, Anne Waldman and “Gossamurmur”, Terence Malick and “The Tree of Life”…
Cover photo courtesy of ALOC Media and Wes Adams.
