Grew up on a farm in central Nebraska, reading comic books, just about smack-dab between the hometowns of Willa Cather and Wright Morris. Son of a truck driver, and of a mom who stayed at home to raise three boys. Went to school in nearby Aurora (pop. 3,500), then to college at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Went to University of Arizona for creative writing program. Moved to Brooklyn, New York, couldn’t find a job, moved back to farm, then to Omaha. Wrote career guides (despite having no career myself). Became the editor of an alternative newsweekly that hemorrhaged money, then was sold. Went to work for another alternative weekly. Publisher couldn’t make any money, stopped paying me. Started a literary festival.

NOVELS:
The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God (Unbridled Books, 2005)
The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters (BlueHen/Putnam, 2002)

NON-FICTION:
Brothers and Beasts: An Anthology of Men on Fairy Tales (essay forthcoming; anthology includes: Neil Gaiman, Jack Zipes, Gregory Maguire, Michael Patrick Hearn, and many others.)

A FEW WORDS ABOUT THE PHANTOM LIMBS OF THE ROLLOW SISTERS, WINNER OF THE NEBRASKA BOOK AWARD:
“… spirited, offbeat… [Schaffert] creates a colorful, not unduly precious world in which everything seems to mirror the sisters’ idiosyncrasies. … Like his characters, Mr. Schaffert grew up on a farm in Nebraska and seems to have cultivated a sense of exquisite boredom mixed with wry humor. His book is likably attuned to its geography. … he displays an outlook well suited to the paradoxical.”
– JANET MASLIN, THE NEW YORK TIMES

“…boondocks-Gothic … quietly tragic… Set among the failed farms and roadside ruins of small-town Nebraska, the novel is a series of vignettes in the lives of two sisters on the cusp of adulthood. … The sisters lose their childhood innocence only to acquire an adult version, in which growing up requires them to abandon all faith and conviction. As long as the sisters have each other, nothing else matters.”
– THE WASHINGTON POST

“One has to admire an author who sets his first novel in rural Nebraska. That landscape was put on the literary map a century ago by Willa Cather … in The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters by Timothy Schaffert, a narrative both sweet and audacious unfolds, encroaching Cather’s pinnacle just a bit. … I wanted to know what becomes of these brave and funny sisters. The descriptive gifts of the author are great.”
– UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL

“Timothy Schaffert writes of connections made, connections broken, connections longed for. His writing is gritty and down to earth, and yet, he writes poetic images of powerful and painful beauty that transcend any earth-bound tether. Two sisters, powerfully joined even when far apart, move through seemingly unfathomable events, trying to make sense of their world, as it was, is, and will be. Schaffert is an estimable guide through their haunted existence.”
– GLENN RAUCHER, LITERARY ARTS COORDINATOR, THE WRITER’S VOICE NEW YORK