About AGNI
AGNI is a literary magazine housed at Boston University and known “among readers around the world,” as the writers group PEN put it, “for publishing important new writers early in their careers, many of them translated into English for the first time.”
The print magazine appears twice yearly, in late April and late October. A very small portion of each is reprinted on this site, but you’ll also find a trove of writing published exclusively online, including categories like reviews and interviews that we tend not to feature in “the print.”
Most of the writing we publish comes to us unsolicited. Our authors and translators include Sharon Olds, Patricia Smith, Stephen Dixon, Donald Quist, Joan Wickersham, Michael Mejia, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, Rita Dove, Victoria Lancelotta, Jo Ann Beard, Peter Balakian, Noah Warren, Jenny Xie, Kaveh Akbar, Magdalena Tulli, Marilyn Hacker, Dorthe Nors, Bruce Smith, Cyrus Cassells, Melanie Rae Thon, Susan Bernofsky, Jill McDonough, Robert Long Foreman, Paisley Rekdal, Patrick Modiano, Lia Purpura, Anna Journey, and Maggie Smith.
Cherishing our differences as much as the verities we share, we are drawn to writers of every creed, race, orientation, gender, ethnicity, culture, national origin, age, and experience. We’re especially proud when we can lay claim to being the first to publish a new writer or translator.
Tags
Certain functions of this new site will improve over time. For example, only a small number of the pieces available online have been tagged. We plan to assign thematic tags to every poem, story, essay, review, interview, and blog post on the site: these tags drive the Related Pieces feature at the bottom of every content page, and readers can also search thematically by clicking on a tag wherever it appears.
Our tags may change from time to time, but we’re starting with the following list: Aging, Animals, Arts, Class, Crime, Dystopia, Education, Ethnicity, Family, Food, Gender, Home, Illness, Journeys, Loss, Mental Health, Mysteries, Nature, Parenthood, Politics, Race, Relationships, Sexuality, Spirituality, Technology, Violence, War, Work, and Youth. Other tags will be used primarily for interviews, reviews, and blog posts: On Fiction, On Nonfiction, On Poetry, Publishing, Reading, Translating, and Writing Process.
Maintaining our quality
If you find any problems on the site, even so much as a misspelled word or a missed quotation mark, we’d love to hear from you.
Have you contributed work to the magazine? If so, please take a moment to search using your full publishing name and, when titles come up, click on your name to reach your author page. There, you should find a listing of every piece you’ve ever published with us—and the ones available online should be correct in every particular. Please contact us if you find anything amiss. (We’re also happy to update your bio whenever there’s new information.)
Photographs and Art
Photographs on the site are by members of the AGNI staff or by Kalman Zabarsky.