James Magruder is a fiction writer, playwright, and translator. His stories have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Subtropics, Bloom, The Normal School, New Stories from the Midwest, The Hopkins Review, and Idaho Review, among others. His début novel, Sugarless, was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, the VCU Cabell First Novelists Award, and shortlisted for the 2010 William Saroyan International Writing Prize. His story collection, Let Me See It, was published in June 2014 by TriQuarterly Books. Love Slaves of Helen Hadley Hall, a second novel, was published in 2016.
His translations and adaptations for the stage of works by Marivaux, Molière, Dancourt, Gozzi, Labiche, Lesage, Giraudoux, Hoffmansthal, and Dickens have been produced on and off-Broadway, across the U.S., and in Germany and Japan. His plays Joan and Bootsie, Dunkler-Related Disorders, and Bad Beans have been staged in Baltimore, Atlanta, and New York, and published in The Art of the One-Act, Third Coast, and Arts & Letters. His Three French Comedies (Yale University Press) was named an “Outstanding Literary Translation” by the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA). He wrote or co-wrote the books to two Broadway musicals, Triumph of Love (1997) and Head Over Heels (2018).
He is a six-time recipient of an Individual Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council. In addition to MacDowell, his writing has also been supported by the VCCA, the Hermitage, the New Harmony Project, the Ucross Foundation, the Blue Mountain Center, the Jerome Foundation, the Kenyon Playwrights Conference, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He holds degrees in French literature from Cornell and Yale and a D.F.A. from the Yale School of Drama. He teaches dramaturgy at Swarthmore College.
