Portrait of Sven Birkerts

Sven Birkerts

Sven Birkerts is coeditor of AGNI. He is the author of eleven books: An Artificial Wilderness: Essays on 20th Century Literature (William Morrow), The Electric Life: Essays on Modern Poetry (William Morrow), American Energies: Essays on Fiction (William Morrow), The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (Faber & Faber), Readings (Graywolf), My Sky Blue Trades: Growing Up Counter in a Contrary Time (Viking, 2002), Reading Life (Graywolf, 2007), Then, Again: The Art of Time in the Memoir (Graywolf, 2008), The Other Walk (Graywolf, 2011), Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age (Graywolf, 2015), and The Miro Worm and the Mysteries of Writing (Arrowsmith Press, 2024). He has edited Tolstoy’s Dictaphone: Writers and the Muse (Graywolf) as well as Writing Well (with Donald Hall) and The Evolving Canon (Allyn & Bacon).

He has received grants from the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation. He was winner of the Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle in 1985 and the Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award from PEN for the best book of essays in 1990. Birkerts has reviewed regularly for The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, Esquire, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Mirabella, Parnassus, The Yale Review, and other publications. He has taught writing at Harvard University, Emerson College, Amherst College, Mt. Holyoke College, and the graduate Bennington Writing Seminars, which he directed for ten years. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts. (updated 4/2025)

AGNI has published the following work:

The Uncanny Valley

Editor’s Note by Sven Birkerts

Reflections at 50

Essay by Sven Birkerts

Interiors

Editor’s Note by Sven Birkerts

The Fitful Tracing of a Portal

Editor’s Note by Sven Birkerts

From the Interregnum

Editor’s Note by Sven Birkerts

Losing, Finding, Improvising

Editor’s Note by Sven Birkerts

“Caress the Detail”: Thoughts on Repair

Editor’s Note by Sven Birkerts

Booze Snow Cone with Crème de Menthe

Editor’s Note by Sven Birkerts

Derek Walcott at BU: A Sorting

Editor’s Note by Sven Birkerts

Drowning

Editor’s Note by Sven Birkerts

“What Next?”

Editor’s Note by Sven Birkerts

It Wants to Find You

Editor’s Note by Sven Birkerts

Birkerts and I

Editor’s Note by Sven Birkerts

“This Just In—”: Notes from the Couch and the Writing Desk

Editor’s Note by Sven Birkerts

Double Take

Editor’s Note by Sven Birkerts

The Problem of Other Minds

Editor’s Note by Sven Birkerts

The Nightcrawler, Joan Miró

Editor’s Note by Sven Birkerts

Ten Broad Swipes at the Problem of Structure in the Essay (and Perhaps Other Genres as Well)

Editor’s Note by Sven Birkerts

Semblance: Something Else Again

Editor’s Note by Sven Birkerts

Notebook: Style

Editor’s Note by Sven Birkerts

Vertigo

Editor’s Note by Sven Birkerts

The Golden Book

Editor’s Note by Sven Birkerts

I’ll take Hell in a Handbasket for five hundred, Alex.

Editor’s Note by Sven Birkerts

And What Is Writing

Editor’s Note by Sven Birkerts

What Remains

Editor’s Note by Sven Birkerts

The Advertent Eye

Editor’s Note by Sven Birkerts

In the Commissaries of Hell

Editor’s Note by Sven Birkerts

The Walk

Editor’s Note by Sven Birkerts

The Thinker in the Garden

Editor’s Note by Sven Birkerts

The Hive Life

Editor’s Note by Sven Birkerts

The Ideal Reader

Editor’s Note by Sven Birkerts

Reading at the Limit

Editor’s Note by Sven Birkerts

Noble Rot

Editor’s Note by Sven Birkerts

Found in the Dreamhouse

Review by Sven Birkerts

Joseph Brodsky

Essay by Sven Birkerts

A Conversation with James Carroll

Conversation by Sven Birkerts

Biography and the Dissolving Self: A Note

Essay by Sven Birkerts

The Woman in the Garden

Essay by Sven Birkerts

Reflections of a Non-Political Man

Essay by Sven Birkerts

Starting

Essay by Sven Birkerts

Notes from a Confession

Essay by Sven Birkerts

James Wright’s “Hammock”: A Sounding

Essay by Sven Birkerts

Last Things First: Czeslaw Milosz’s Witness of Poetry

Essay by Sven Birkerts
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