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 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.
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.
"[1] 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.
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.
Shoemaker has published in English great Zen masters, including Baisao, Bankei, Bassui, Bodhidharma, Dogen, Hakuin, Muso, Senzaki, and several others.
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, a literary non-profit in Wallowa County, Oregon, that offers workshops, conferences, and residencies to develop writing talent among Western writers.