Lance Ringel’s widely acclaimed debut novel Flower of Iowa, an epic love story between two soldiers in the First World War, won the Foreword Indies Book of the Year Award (Gold for War & Military Fiction), two Benjamin Franklin Awards (Gold for Romance Fiction and Silver for LGBTQ), and the Independent Publisher Book Award (Bronze for Military & Wartime Fiction), and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award (Gay Romance).
His play In Love with the Arrow Collar Man, based on the true story of famed illustrator J.C. Leyendecker and his muse-lover Charles Beach, premiered at New York’s Theatre 80 St. Marks, and has been performed in conjunction with a Leyendecker exhibition at the Reynolda House Museum of American Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Both Arrow Collar Man and the musical Animal Story, for which Ringel wrote book and lyrics to Chuck Muckle’s score, made the semifinals of the New York New Works Theatre Festival. A stage adaptation of Flower of Iowa achieved the finals of the same festival, and a video adaptation of that production premiered online on Veterans Day 2020, hosted by the Little Theatre of Winston-Salem, which co-produced the Reynolda presentation of Arrow Collar Man. Ringel’s newest play, Flash/Frozen, also based on true historical events, currently can be seen online in a video adaptation, with a stage production planned for the near future.
Ringel’s career as a writer and journalist has spanned more than four decades. At Vassar College, where he has worked for 21 years, he was principal writer for Vassar Voices, a staged reading honoring the college’s sesquicentennial, which premiered at Jazz at Lincoln Center with Meryl Streep, Frances Sternhagen, and Lisa Kudrow. He also wrote the narrative for At Home in the World, a joint production of Vassar and Japan’s Ashinaga Foundation, which played in Tokyo, New York, Washington, D.C., and Kampala, Uganda, under the direction of John Caird.
Ringel also has had a lengthy career in public service. He served as Assistant Commissioner of Human Rights under New York Governor Mario Cuomo, at the National Gay Task Force under veteran LGBTQ advocate Virginia Apuzzo, and currently is a member of the Dutchess County (NY) Human Rights Commission. He is also, improbably, a medal-winning bowler, having scored a bronze in team competition at the 2006 Gay Games in Chicago and then a gold at the Outgames a few weeks later in Montreal.
A native of central Illinois, he resides in both Poughkeepsie, New York, and New York City, with his spouse of 45 years, actor-composer-director Chuck Muckle.
