Angles was born in
Columbus, Ohio on July 10, 1971. When he was fifteen, he traveled to Japan for the first time as a high school
exchange student, staying in the small, southwestern Japanese city of
Shimonoseki in
Yamaguchi Prefecture, which represented a turning point in his life. Since then he has spent several years living in various Japanese cities, including
Saitama City,
Kobe, and
Kyoto. While a graduate student in Japanese literature at
Ohio State University in the mid-1990s, Angles began translating Japanese short stories and poetry, publishing in a wide variety of literary magazines in the United States, Canada, and Australia. He is particularly interested in translating poetry and modernist texts, since he feels these have been largely overlooked and understudied by academics in the West. He is passionate about translation as a discipline, stating that "without translation, we would be locked within our own cultures, unable to access the vast, overwhelming wealth of the rest of the world's intellect. By translating literary works, we are making that world heritage available to literally millions of people." Angles has also argued that although the Japanese literary establishment is fairly balanced in the numbers of male and female authors currently being published, translation tends overwhelmingly to prioritize the translation of male authors. That led him to focus on using translation to share underrepresented voices in Japanese literature, especially those of women, gay writers, and socially engaged writers. His book-length translations include the work of novelist, ethnologist, and poet
Shinobu Orikuchi, feminist poets
Hiromi Itō and
Takako Arai, the gay poet
Mutsuo Takahashi, science fiction author
Shigeru Kayama, novelist
Yoko Tawada, and contemporary ecopoet
Sayaka Ōsaki. Angles earned his Ph.D. in 2004 with a dissertation about representations of male homoeroticism in the literature of
Kaita Murayama and the popular writer
Ranpo Edogawa. This is the basis for his book
Writing the Love of Boys published in 2011 by
University of Minnesota Press, which also includes new research on
Taruho Inagaki and
Jun'ichi Iwata. In this book, he shows that segments of early twentieth-century Japanese society were influenced by Western
psychology to believe that
homosexuality was a pathological aberration. These views, however, were countered by a number of writers who argued precisely the opposite: that it was a vital, powerful, and even beautiful experience that had a long, rich history in Japan. Angles draws upon
fiction,
poetry,
essays,
diaries,
paintings and other visual material to trace the relations between these writers and the inspiration that they drew from early Western
homophile writers, such as
Edward Carpenter,
John Addington Symonds, and
Walt Whitman. In the conclusion of the book, Angles also discusses the ways that contemporary
BL manga have inherited and built upon the ideas fashioned by
Kaita Murayama,
Ranpo Edogawa, and
Taruho Inagaki several decades earlier. Angles' other research involves studies of popular Japanese culture in the 1920s and 1930s, writing about contemporary Japanese poetry, and studying the history of translation in Japan. He has also contributed a critically acclaimed voice-over commentary to the
Criterion Collection's release of
Kenji Mizoguchi's 1954 film
Sansho the Bailiff. ==Honors==