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Jack Shoemaker (b. 1946) is an American editor and publisher of notable literary works, currently serving as editorial director and vice-president at Counterpoint Press in Berkeley, California. Shoemaker has over the course of his long career edited and published books under several imprints, including North Point, Pantheon, Shoemaker & Hoard, and Counterpoint. Shoemaker has brought before the public the works of a wide range of writers, including 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’s reputation rests on steadfast support of author-driven literary publishing ventures that have withstood major shifts in American book-publishing models and the rise of big-chain bookstores. Shoemaker’s literary signature is a West Coast progressive influence, and the assumption that worthy publishing entails mindfulness and political awareness. For example, Shoemaker was the first American publisher of Thich Nhat Hanh, and he has been the lifelong publisher of world-renowned activist and environmentalist Wendell Berry. Shoemaker’s literary interests in publishing continue as he explores history, biography, science, philosophy, natural history, landscape writing, and most especially work on behalf of the environment and sustainable agriculture.

Background

A native Californian, Jack Shoemaker began his literary career as a bookseller in 1963 in Santa Barbara. Over the course of forty years he has owned or managed several influential independent literary bookshops, including The Unicorn Bookshop, Serendipity Books, and Sand Dollar Booksellers & Publishers. His approach to running a bookstore was somewhat unorthodox, in that his inventory had a longer shelf-life than was common practice in bookselling, and that he conducted a voluminous correspondence with writers such as Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan, and Guy Davenport, which enabled him to stock 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.”

Publishing

Jack Shoemaker’s entry into publishing evolved from bookselling and his early presses were extensions of independent bookstores he operated. An early publishing venture, Unicorn, evolved from a bookstore in Isla Vista, near the campus of University of California-Santa Barbara operated by Shoemaker from 1967 to 1968. In that capacity, Unicorn published in 1968 a book of poems, The Cry of Vietnam, by Thich Nhat Hanh at a time when he was a little known Vietnamese Buddhist priest, the last counselor to monks who had immolated themselves as protest in Vietnam. A second volume published by Unicorn, Hark, Hark, the Nark, was a pamphlet that instructed readers on their civil rights in the event of an arrest for drug possession. Unicorn was followed by Sand Dollar, Booksellers and Publishers, which began operations in 1970 from Berkeley, California, “a bookshop for poets.” Shoemaker continued his career as a bookseller until 1979, when he co-founded North Point Press with William Turnbull, a civil engineer who loved literature. North Point enjoyed the commitment of a core group of authors with whom Shoemaker had worked, including Berry, Snyder, Aitken, Fisher, Connell, Salter, and Davenport. North Point went on to publish iconic literary works, with Shoemaker serving as the company’s editor-in-chief for the entire life of the company, twelve years during which nearly 400 titles were published. North Point authors claimed many awards, including several MacArthur Fellowships, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. North Point Press also produced several best-sellers listed on the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and Boston Globe lists, including Beryl Markham’s West With the Night and Splendid Outcasts, Evan S. Connell’s Son of the Morning Star, and Barry Lopez’s Crow and Weasel.

When North Point closed in 1991, Shoemaker’s stable of fiercely loyal writers traveled with him to Pantheon, where he served as West Coast editor of the Knopf Publishing Group. Frank H. Pearl, an entrepreneur who specialized in leveraged buyouts, lured Shoemaker away from the Pantheon imprint at Knopf to found Counterpoint Press in 1994 in Washington, D.C., and Shoemaker’s core group of authors followed him once again. In 2004 Shoemaker left Counterpoint, and with his longtime associate Trish Hoard established a new company, Shoemaker & Hoard, Publishers, to continue his work. Soon affiliated with the Avalon Publishing Group, Shoemaker & Hoard published more than 100 titles in its few years of existence. Additional writers published by Shoemaker, either at Counterpoint or at Shoemaker & Hoard, include Michael Downing, Robert Bringhurst, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nicholas Christopher, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Peter Coyote, Jay Griffiths, Robert Hass, Ann Pancake, Jed Perl, Mary Robison, Valerie Trueblood, Lawrence Wechsler, Janet Frame, and Cynthia Shearer. Later partnering with Charlie Winton, Shoemaker purchased Counterpoint Press from the Perseus Book Group, and another press, Soft Skull Press. At that time Counterpoint Press also formed an operating agreement with Sierra Club Books.

American Buddhism

As an editor and publisher Shoemaker has exerted a considerable, steady influence on Buddhism in the United States, publishing notable translations of Buddhist sutras and texts, including work by Red Pine, Thomas Cleary, and David Hinton. Shoemaker has published in English the greatest Zen masters, including Baisao, Bankei, Bassui, Bodhidharma, Dogen, Hakuin, Muso, Senzaki, and several others. Shoemaker first became interested in Zen Buddhism through the work of Gary Snyder and Kenneth Rexroth. Shoemaker was a student of Robert Aitken and published several books of Aitken's including, Taking the Path of Zen, thought by many to be the best practical introductory guide to the study and practice of Zen. Later he co-edited with Aitken's senior Dharma heir, Nelson Foster, The Roaring Stream: A New Zen Reader, a widely celebrated anthology of Zen texts. “As a Buddhist, I’m simply a beginner,” Shoemaker told an interviewer in 2005. “There are many of us trying to discover if there can be an authentic American Buddhism, oriented toward lay practitioners.”

Awards, Honors, and Service Shoemaker served from 1974–1978 on the Literature Panel of the National Endowment of the Arts, serving his last eighteen months as that panel’s chairman. He has also served on the California Arts Council, the Western States Arts Foundation panel, the North Carolina Arts Council literature panel, and several other boards and awards panels devoted to literature, the visual arts, and dance. Shoemaker was a co-founder of Small Press Distribution, a distributor for the work of dozens of small independent American presses, which is today the largest and most successful operation of its kind. Together with Jack Hicks and Gary Snyder, he founded The Art of the Wild, a summer program in Squaw Valley, California, devoted to the practice and study of writing related to environmental concerns and natural history. Shoemaker also serves on the advisory board of Fishtrap: Writing and the West, a literary non-profit in Wallowa County, Oregon, that offers workshops, conferences, and residencies to develop writing talent among Western writers. In 1981 Publisher’s Weekly named Shoemaker the recipient of the Carey-Thomas Award for Creative Publishing. PubWest awarded him the 2013 Jack D. Rittenhouse Award for lifetime achievement and contributions to the Western book community.

Personal

Jack Shoemaker married the former Vicki Guerin in 1965. They had two children, Sean Shoemaker, and Demian Shoemaker. The marriage ended in divorce in 1991. In 1996 he married California novelist Jane Vandenburgh in Washington, D.C. They raised her two children from a previous marriage, Noah Zimmerman and Eva Zimmerman. Shoemaker lives with his family in Point Richmond, California.