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 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; Intimate Worlds Enclosed by Takahashi Mutsuo (Kawamura Memorial Museum, 2010); Killing Kanoko: Selected Poems of Ito Hiromi (Action Books, 2009); and Soul Dance: Poems of Takako Arai (Mi’Te Press, 2009).

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.

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