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William Pierce
Portrait of William Pierce

William Pierce is coeditor of AGNI. His short stories have appeared in Granta, Ecotone, American Literary Review, and elsewhere. Excerpts from his novel Twenty Sixteen can be found in Harvard Review, The Western Humanities Review, and on the Freeman’s channel at Literary Hub, and other work has appeared in Electric Literature, Little Star, Tin House online, The Writer’s Chronicle, Solstice, Glimmer Train, Consequence, and as part of MacArthur Fellow Anna Schuleit Haber’s art project “The Alphabet,” commissioned by the Fitchburg Art Museum. Pierce is the author of Reality Hunger: On Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (Arrowsmith Press, 2016), a monograph first serialized as a three-part essay at The Los Angeles Review of Books. With E. C. Osondu, he coedited The AGNI Portfolio of African Fiction. Find more at williampiercewriter.com. (updated 3/2023)

His first essay for AGNI, “Fabulously Real,” received special mention in the 2006 Pushcart Prize anthology, and his introduction to AGNI 91, “The Peculiarities of Literary Meaning,” is cited in the 2022 Pushcart anthology. He is interviewed here at NewPages.com.

AGNI has published the following work:

Editor’s Note
Looking Out for Humanity
AGNI 98 Technology Writing Process Publishing
Editor’s Note
On the Fraught Subject of Value
AGNI 96 Writing Process Reading
Editor’s Note
A Few Thoughts on Truth and Fiction
Editor’s Note
The Peculiarities of Literary Meaning
AGNI 91 On Fiction On Nonfiction On Poetry
Essays
Losing Stephen Dixon
Online 2019 Loss On Fiction Reading
Essays
Crucibles: Report on a Report
AGNI 64 Print Only
Essays
Crucibles: “Let Us Imagine”
AGNI 65 Print Only
Essays
Crucibles: The Orchestration of Surprise
AGNI 67 Print Only
Essays
Crucibles: Intimations of Randomness
AGNI 69 Print Only
Essays
Crucibles: Walser Before & After
AGNI 73 Print Only
Essays
Crucibles: Is Knausgaard for Real?
AGNI 81 Print Only
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