James Magruder

A Baltimore resident for thirty-five years, JAMES MAGRUDER was born in Washington, D.C., and moved with his family five times before settling down in Chicagoland. These early and frequent dislocations, combined with a brutish stepfather, a burgeoning queer identity, and a veeeery late puberty, have provided him with a backlog of humiliating grist and many outstanding scores to settle.

He went off to Cornell University, spent his junior year in Paris, served time as a grad student in the Yale French department, then defected to the Yale School of Drama, where he received his doctorate. His dissertation, THREE FRENCH COMEDIES was named an "Outstanding Literary Translation of the Year" by the American Literary Translators Association. Today, his versions of Molière, Marivaux, Lesage, Labiche, Gozzi, Hofmannsthal, Dickens, and Giraudoux have been produced across the country and earn him tens of dollars. He also wrote the book for the Broadway musical TRIUMPH OF LOVE (1997) and co-wrote HEAD OVER HEELS, a deeply queer, blank verse mashup of Sir Philip Sidney's ARCADIA (1580) and the song catalogue of the Go-Go's), for which he received a nomination for Outstanding Book of a Musical by the Outer Critics Circle.

He began writing fiction in 2002. His stories have appeared in StoryQuarterly, The Idaho Review, The Hopkins Review, New England Review, The Gettysburg Review, Bloom, Subtropics, The Normal School, and elsewhere, and the anthologies BOY CRAZY and NEW STORIES FROM THE MIDWEST. His debut novel, SUGARLESS, was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist, and was shortlisted for both the VCU Cabell First Novelist Prize and the 2010 William Saroyan International Writing Prize. Northwestern University Press published his first collection of stories, LET ME SEE IT, in 2014. LOVE SLAVES OF HELEN HADLEY HALL, nineteen years in the making, was published by a now-defunct indie press in 2016 and reissued in 2017 by another now-defunct indie press. VAMP UNTIL READY, a summer stock novel set in upstate New York in the 1980's, was published in September 20211. His most recent linked story collection, NO ONE IS LOOKING AT YOU, came out in September 2025.

His first--and definitely his last--book of non-fiction, an eight-year commissioned project titled THE PLAY'S THE THING: FIFTY YEARS OF YALE REPERTORY THEATRE (1966-2016) was published in September 2024 to thundering silence.

A five-time MacDowell Fellow, Magruder’s writing has also been supported by the Maryland State Arts Council, the New Harmony Project, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, the Ucross Foundation, the Blue Mountain Center, and the Jerome Foundation.