James Ragan is an internationally recognized poet and has lived in Prague, Paris, Athens, and Beijing. He has been honored here and abroad as an ambassador of poetry. In 1985 he was one of three Americans, including Robert Bly and Bob Dylan, invited to perform for Mikhail Gorbachev at the First International Poetry Festival in Moscow. He has since performed for five international heads of state including Czech president Vaclav Havel. Other venues have included Tokyo, Hong Kong, London, Sofia, Vienna, Paris, Warsaw, Prague, and New York, where he performed twice at Carnegie Hall and at the United Nations. He is the recipient of numerous poetry honors including two Fulbright professorships (Yugoslavia and China), the Emerson Poetry Prize, eight Pushcart Prize nominations, an NEA, a Presidential Medal (St. Vincent College), and a Poetry Society of America Gertrude Claytor award. He is also the author of Womb-Weary, The Hunger Wall, Lusions, The World Shouldering I, and Too Long a Solitude, and the plays The Landlord, Saints, and Commedia (first produced by Raymond Burr in the U. S. and later the Soviet Union). He also co-edited Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Collected Poems: 1952–1990. His poetry has been recorded on Sony/Alfa Records and on A Century of Recorded Poetry for Rhino Records. He has a Ph.D. and is the director of the Graduate Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California. In 1996 Buzz Magazine named him “one of the 100 coolest people in Los Angeles: those who make a difference.”