Aaron Shurin is an American poet, essayist, critic, and professor. Born in 1947 in Manhattan, Shurin spent his teenage years in Los Angeles. In 1964, he began attending the University of California at Berkeley where he studied with Denise Levertov, who piqued his interest in poetry.

He returned to the East Coast for a brief period, where he helped found the Good Gay Poets press in Boston, Massachusetts. He returned to California in 1974, settling in San Francisco and becoming actively involved in the poetic and political gay community. In 1980, Shurin enrolled in the New College of California's poetics program, where he studied with by Robert Duncan and Diane Di Prima. Shurin was the first graduate of the college's poetics program, receiving an M.A. in Poetics in 1982.

Shurin has taught at many colleges and universities throughout San Francisco including New College, City College, San Francisco State College, and the University of San Francisco, where he directed the MFA writing program for a number of years.

In addition to appearing in numerous periodicals, Shurin has published more than a dozen books of poetry, including Woman on Fire (1975), The Night Sun (1976), The Graces (1983),The Paradise of Forms: Selected Poems (1999), and Involuntary Lyrics (2005). Additionally, he has published prose and essays, including Unbound: A Book of AIDS (2000).

A prolific poet and scholar, Shurin has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the San Francisco Arts Commission, and the California Arts Council, among others.