Jack Shoemaker

Jack Shoemaker (born 1946) is an American editor and publisher, and current editorial director and vice-president at Counterpoint Press in Berkeley, California. Shoemaker has edited and published books under several imprints, including North Point, Pantheon Books, Shoemaker & Hoard, and Counterpoint. Shoemaker has published books by Guy Davenport, Romulus Linney, Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, Evan S. Connell, MFK Fisher, James Salter, Gina Berriault, Reynolds Price, W.S. Merwin, Michael Palmer, Donald Hall, Anne Lamott, Kay Boyle, Gary Nabhan, Jane Vandenburgh, Carole Maso, and Robert Aitken. Shoemaker supports author-driven literary publishing ventures and mindfulness and political awareness in publishing. Shoemaker was one of the first American publisher of Thich Nhat Hanh, and a major publisher of Wendell Berry.

Jack Shoemaker was born in California and began his literary career as a bookseller in 1965 in Santa Barbara. During the next twenty-five years he owned or managed several influential independent literary bookshops, including The Unicorn Bookshop, Serendipity Books, and Sand Dollar Booksellers & Publishers. He allowed books to stay on the shelves longer than usual. He also corresponded with writers such as Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan, and Guy Davenport and stocked his store with titles they recommended. “I had good instincts, I had enormous presumption, and most of all I had good advisors,” Shoemaker has said of that time. “I was, still am, an autodidact. I did not go to college, so for me the correspondence and reading formed my path in education.”

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