James Magruder

James Magruder is a fiction writer, playwright, and translator. His work has appeared in StoryQuarterly, The Gettysburg Review, New England Review, The Idaho Review, Subtropics, Arts & Letters, Third Coast, AU, Prairie Schooner, Bloom, The Normal School, The Hopkins Review, Gargoyle, the anthologies Boy Crazy and New Stories from the Midwest, and elsewhere. His début novel, Sugarless, (University of Wisconsin Press, 2009) was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, the VCU Cabell First Novelists Award, and shortlisted for the 2010 William Saroyan International Writing Prize. Northwestern University Press published his linked story collection, Let Me See It, in 2014, and it was a Montaigne Medal Finalist in 2015. His second novel, Love Slaves of Helen Hadley Hall, was released in 2016 from Queen’s Ferry Press and reissued by Chelsea Station Editions.

His most recent work for the stage was co-authoring the blank-verse book for Head Over Heels, the Broadway musical mash-up of Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1590) and the song catalog of the Go-Go’s. Other produced translations and adaptations include Christmas Carol 1941; Marivaux’s The Triumph of Love and the book for its Broadway musical version, Triumph of Love; Labiche’s Eating Crow; Lesage’s Turcaret; Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid and The Miser, Gozzi’s The Love of Three Oranges, and Der Bourgeois Bigshot, a reconstruction of the Hofmannsthal/Strauss musical comedy Der Bürger als Edelmann for Princeton University. His Three French Comedies (Yale University Press) was designated an “Outstanding Literary Translation” by the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA). Current projects include a musical adaptation of Amy Blooms’s novel, Lucky Us, and a commissioned chronicle of the first half-century of the Yale Repertory Theatre, titled Serving the Play: Yale Rep @ 50.

He is a five-time fellow of the MacDowell Colony and a six-time recipient of an Individual Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council. His writing has also been supported by the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Hermitage, the New Harmony Project, the Ucross Foundation, the Blue Mountain Center, the Jerome Foundation, the Albee Colony, the Kenyon Playwrights Conference, and the 2010 Sewanee Writers’ Conference, where he was a Walter E. Dakin Fellow in Fiction. He holds degrees in French literature from Cornell and Yale and a DFA from the Yale School of Drama, where he taught translation and adaptation for thirteen years. A Baltimore native since 1991, he currently teaches dramaturgy at Swarthmore College.