James Ragan is an award-winning poet and playwright. Translated into 15 languages, with work appearing in 30 anthologies, he has authored 10 books of poetry including
In the Talking Hours, Womb-Weary, The Hunger Wall, Lusions, Selected Poetry, Too Long a Solitude, The World Shouldering I, To Sing Us Out of Silence, The Chanter’s Reed, and Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s Collected Poems (co-editor). He has read for 7 heads of state and at the United Nations, Carnegie Hall, for CNN, PBS, NPR, and audiences in 34 nations, including China, Japan, England, France, Spain, Brazil, Ireland, and the Czech Republic, etc. In 1985, he was one of four poets from the West, including Seamus Heaney, Bob Dylan, and Robert Bly, invited to perform at the First International Poetry Festival in Moscow. Vaclav Havel has praised him as an “ambassador of the arts.” Honors include 3 Fulbright Professorships, 2 Honorary Doctorates, the Emerson Poetry Prize, 9 Pushcart Prize nominations, a PSA Citation, and the Swan Foundation Humanitarian Award. Ragan’s plays, The Landlord and Commedia, have been staged in the U.S, Moscow, Athens, Beijing and Prague. For 25 years he directed the Graduate Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California and currently serves each summer for 26 years as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Poetry at Charles University in Prague. In 1996 BUZZ Magazine named Ragan one of the “100 Coolest People in Los Angeles: Those Who Make a Difference.”
