Shaun Griffin

Shaun Griffin is the Co-Founder and former Director of Community Chest, a non-profit 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.

Griffin took an adamant stance against the development of Yucca Mountain, during which he painted, sculpted, and wrote poetry against the site. This work was exhibited in a multi-artist show responding to the environment at Western Nevada College’s XS Gallery in 1991. Since then, he has held several exhibitions of watercolor and poetry throughout the state. His paintings are on the covers of two of his books, and his recent exhibition of paintings and poems, "Border Stories," (2021-2022) on the US/Mexican border toured the state for six months.

In 1999, Griffin started a poetry reading series at Reno’s Sundance Books and Music to celebrate National Poetry Month—a month-long series of readings by regional and national poets including the late Sam Hamill, Sherwin Bitsui, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Troy Jollimore, William O’Daly, Rebecca Seiferle, Gary Short, Dave Lee, and a host of others. April 2024 was the 25th anniversary of the reading program. In 2019 he began a biweekly radio program, A Writer’s World, a podcast on writers and writing that airs on Spotify and has more than 100 episodes.

For over thirty 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. He also edited a book of essays on the late poet and critic, Hayden Carruth, "From Sorrow’s Well: The Poetry of Hayden Carruth," released from the University of Michigan Press in their Under Discussion Series in 2013. 

Griffin received the Rosemary McMillan Lifetime Achievement in Art Award in 2006, awarded by Sierra Arts Foundation, Reno, Nevada, and the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts in 1995. In 2014, he was inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame.

Would that any word wake America from its slumber,
I would surrender all hope of writing another poem
And join hands in its offering.

—Shaun Griffin