About

James Colgan is an author, actor, director, and award-winning playwright residing in Eastern Kentucky. His short story, “Shelter,” which is part of a collection of stories in which World War II serves as a backdrop, was published by the venerable Sewanee Review in its Spring 2016 edition, and “The Long Night’s Moon” was published by daCunha Global in 2017. “The Scent of Coming Home,” also part of the aforementioned collection, was a finalist in Glimmer Train’s 2018 Family Matters contest. The entire collection, “Going Upriver to Burnside: Stories of the Great Campaign, was an Honorable Mention for the 2018 Hawk Mountain Award.
As a playwright, his sexy farce, The Story of Oh (Revised and Abridged), won the Critic’s Award for Best Play in the Fringe of Marin in 2010, was a finalist in the Samuel French 2011 OOB Festival, and was produced at The Players Theatre in New York in February of 2020. His drama, Making It Home, was a finalist in the 2013 AACT New Play Fest, a finalist in the 2016 New Play Festival by What If? Theatre, and a finalist in the 2020 OC-Centric New Play Festival. The Fuhrer’s Mistress, based on the life of Eva Braun, won Best Play in the Jewel Box Theatre 2016 new play contest and has since been produced in Morehead, Kentucky, and Denton, Texas. Interrogation, a comedy about relationships, was performed by the Phoenix Stage Company in Oakville, CT, in 2018. The Mulberry Bush, a comedy about falling in and out of love, was premiered in 2018 as part of the OC Centric Festival at Chapman University in Orange, CA. Red Roses at a Funeral was also premiered in 2018 by the Eden Prairie Players. Mr. Colgan’s latest work, Avoidance, a docu-drama on the opioid epidemic was first performed in January of 2019.
Colgan lives on a five acre lake in the middle of a wildlife preserve near Wallingford, Kentucky, with his lovely wife, Mary Beth, herself a poet, singer, and artist, and their goofball cat, Mooch.

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