Shaun Griffin

Shaun Griffin is the co-founder and former director of Community Chest, a nonprofit agency serving children and families in northwestern Nevada since 1991. He is also the former founding director of the state’s Homeless Youth Education office. His memoir about this long journey to build community in rural Nevada, "Anthem for a Burnished Land," came out in 2016 from Southern Utah University Press. He has spent a lifetime building bridges where there were none for all members of the community.

During the mid-80s, Griffin worked in Stanford University’s foremost community outreach program, starting several disability initiatives on the campus. He later founded a minority youth outreach program at four universities in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2004, he received the Mike O’Callaghan Humanitarian Award, named after the former Nevada governor.

For over 30 years, Griffin has taught a poetry workshop at Northern Nevada Correctional Center and published a biennial journal of their work, Razor Wire. He regularly contributes poetry, essays, and translations to literary journals, and was Editor-at-Large at Calapooya and Contributing Editor at Weber Studies. Griffin is the author of seven books of poetry, editor of two anthologies and three memoirs, and translator of a book of poems.