Home | James O'Connor

About

ABOUT

James O’Connor is a poet, playwright, and translator based in New York City. He was awarded an Edward F. Albee Fellowship for his play Timor Mortis, and more recently he completed The Goddess Trilogy, a series of tragicomic plays that include Goddess, American Father, and Revenge. His plays have been read at the Lark Play Development Center, the Black Box Performing Arts Center, and Scene & Heard in London. His translations of the Cuban poet Dulce María Loynaz were published in England by Carcanet Press and in America by Archipelago Books. The U.K. edition, Against Heaven, was shortlisted for the Poetry Society’s Popescu Prize for Poetry in Translation and the U.S. edition, Absolute Solitude, was a finalist for the 2017 PEN America Award for Poetry in Translation. His translations and book reviews have appeared in Guernica, BOMB, the Brooklyn Rail, Seneca Review, Poetry International, and England’s Poetry Nation Review.

Plays

PLAYS

"James O'Connor is almost savantically aware that only three themes exist within the marrow of the dramatic body: Birth, Love, Death . . . And not necessarily in that order. While he is a master observer of the intricacies of human intention, and a fine mapper of the landmarks along the seemingly infinite road toward the finite result, he does not waste his audiences' time with non-essential rest stops. Every detail hits you like a swiftly swung stick, but his deep empathy and wicked sense of humor synthesize painful truths into essential nourishment."

Jakob Holder

Author of Housebreaking and Bedtime Solos

Executive Director of the Edward F. Albee Foundation

"James O’Connor is fearless. We go to the theatre to watch people risking things, and O’Connor stakes everything, from the word go. In American Father he has delved into his fears, relationships and neuroses with an effervescent abandon. The wonder of it is that he manages to transform what might be painful into something of joy, like a surgeon who not only operates on himself, but does so on a rolling chuckle. His characters jump out from the hitherto suppressed sections of his family album and from a drunken obituary writer’s dressing-up box. They are hell-bent on entertaining us, and their language fizzes with a glee which, when the moment is right, turns to something acid enough to cut through all the frivolity to a vital truth - about the ways our failings betray our dreams. American Father is a fairground Ghost Train ride called “Family Truths,” child-like and wise all at once."

Simon Scardifield

Actor, Writer, Director
London, England

Contact

Translations