Jeffrey Angles

Born in Columbus, Ohio, on July 10, 1971, Jeffrey Angles earned his PhD in Japanese literature from Ohio State University in 2004.

Angles’s many translations of contemporary Japanese poetry include Mutsuo Takahashi’s Only Yesterday (Canarium Books, 2023); Hiromi Itō’s The Thorn Puller (Stone Bridge, 2023); Sayaka Ōsaki’s Noisy Animal (Vagabond, 2023); and Forest of Eyes: Selected Poems of Tada Chimako (University of California Press, 2010), which was selected for the 2011 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets.

Much of Angles’s academic work focuses on historical studies of ideology within Japanese literature. His book Writing the Love of Boys: Origins of Bishonen Culture in Japanese Modernist Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) explores representations of same-sex love in early twentieth-century Japanese poetry and prose. Among his other critical work, Angles has also produced commentary for Kenji Mizoguchi’s Sansho the Bailiff, released by the Criterion Collection.

Angles’s numerous awards include a Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature, as well as grants for translation from the PEN Club of America and the National Endowment for the Arts. His collection of poetry Watashi no hizukehenkōsen (My International Date Line, 2016), written in Japanese, won the Yomiuri Prize for Literature, making him the first non-native speaker ever to win the prize for a book of poetry.

Angles is a professor of Japanese and translation at Western Michigan University.