About the Author

Sheppard Ranbom is the author of King Philip’s War, I Didn’t Know Kyoto, and the comic novella in verse, Shadows of the Pines, which will be released in June 2024.

In addition, he has completed a new play—The Love Suicides at Takayama—to be published in 2025, and a forthcoming collection of poems written over many years—Of Now and Long-ago—about an alter-ego who runs a talent agency for those who perform odd jobs that are no more and who struggles to handle the arduous maintenance of his clogged mindpool.

His poetry and essays have appeared in the Leitrim Guardian (special edition commemorating the life of Irish novelist/short story writer John McGahern), Innisfree online poetry journal, and Independent Scholar.

Born and raised in Springfield, Mass. and educated at Colgate University, he has had a strong interest in the natural world; American and Asian culture; libraries, bookstores, and books, and especially Japanese and 20th century Irish literature.

He is the co-founder, with his wife, Mary-Mack Callahan of CommunicationWorks, LLC a national public-affairs firm focused on education, higher education, workforce, and civil rights issues based in Washington, DC that he has led for nearly 30 years. The firm has worked with more 300 education nonprofits; corporations; research organizations; philanthropic organizations; government agencies; and colleges and universities.

He began his career as a journalist focusing on schools and higher education and continues to write about education issues. Through his long career, he wrote an award-winning book-length series of articles, Schooling in Japan: The Paradox in the Pattern for Education Week; articles and advertorials for Time Magazine and The New Yorker; and dozens of reports and whitepapers for his clients on scores of issues on K-12 and higher education. He regularly ghostwrites articles for his clients that have appeared in The New York Times, USA Today, The Baltimore Sun, Forbes, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Education, Education Week, and other publications. He also has written extensively about theatre and the fine arts, including an introduction to the art work of American landscape artists Michele Martin Taylor and Andrei Kushnir.