About Clifford F. Boyle

Clifford F. Boyle is an author, poet, and entrepreneur. He has spent his working life in two disciplines that are rarely held together — literature and technology — and treats neither as a detour from the other.

The writing came first and remains the center of it. Boyle was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for his short story “Messages.” His screenplay Night Landing was optioned by Hans de Weers, the producer behind the Academy Award–winning Antonia’s Line. His poetry collection The Birth of Christmas is published as an excerpt from a larger work still in progress, The Prince of Christmas — the project that has held him longest. He is also the author of the novel CyberScreams, published under a pen name, and of additional short stories under his own name.

His essays and poetry now appear on Navigation, his Substack, where several hundred subscribers read him. The work there turns on how we find our bearings — or fail to — through love, loss, literature, memory, and the passage of time. Some of it is comic. Not all of the comedy is divine.

A 1982 graduate of Harvard, Boyle has also built companies. He founded the privacy-technology company Shazzle, developer of ShazzleChat, and holds three granted U.S. patents with two more applied for. He has built ventures in real estate as well. The founder’s work and the writer’s work have run in parallel for decades rather than in sequence, and both reward the same habit: long attention paid to something that takes years to finish.

He divides his time between the two — writing in one part of the day, building in another — and continues to work toward The Prince of Christmas.