Blog
Revelations beyond the printed page. AGNI’s writers engaged in wide-ranging discussion.
Lia Purpura, Decaying Wood (detail), featured in AGNI 102
Featured
A Cold Halo of Calm
Blog post by Purple Saxifrage
Last night I went to bed earlier than usual. I’d avoided coffee all day so that sleep might come. Yet after half an hour of turning from side to side, the same unworthy temptation returned. To ingest something I knew would poison my soul—still, I could not restrain myself. My hand drifted back to th...
“The Border Moves Through Us”: From Minneapolis, 2026
Blog post by agnimag
To plan a route to pick up my child from school, I check iceout.org for a map of recent ICE sightings. They’ve multiplied in recent days, with the Federal occupation surging to 3,000 agents in Minneapolis, five times the size of the city’s police department. Earlier in the morning, an unconfirmed co...
Memory of Translation
Blog post by Maria B. Olujic
I still have my first book in English, A Picture Dictionary for Children by Garnette Watters and S. A. Courtis, given to me by Mrs. Woodward, a Block Parent volunteer who lived several blocks from our home on Norfolk Street. Though I wasn’t part of the program, Mrs. Woodward had approached me at sch...
What the Poet Taught Me
Blog post by Rachel Basch
in memory of Baron Wormser, February 4, 1948–October 7, 2025
The subject line of the email read “Bad news.” It was late September 2025, and Baron and I were scheduled to teach a weekend writing workshop together in early October. At first, I figured “bad news” meant a scheduling conflict. But the e...
You Are Not the Choir—or, Seeing the Matrix
Blog post by Sarah Rose Nordgren
A couple of years ago I co-organized an AWP (Association for Writers and Writing Programs) Conference panel to discuss the bridges between literature and climate justice. During the Q&A portion of the panel, someone in the audience asked a valid question about whether writing literature addressing c...
The Refrigerated Thought: On Time and Writing
Blog post by Delia Maria Davis
Say I am sitting with my mother and grandmother at the square kitchen table patterned over by vinyl-cloth apples, having just eaten lunch. Our elbows crowd the breadbasket, in which remains one solid slice and one pockmarked. My pointer finger corrals the crumbs. My mother stares at her elbow, where...
Dispatches
Dispatches from Palestine
In its fifty years AGNI has worked to “bring our readers into the living moment, not as tourists, but as engaged participants.” As we expressed in Against Silence: A Collective Statement toward Peace, we believe that all who bear witness to the ongoing violence in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, including Palestinians under siege and in diaspora as well as Israelis and diaspora Jews intent on peace, need space to speak. AGNI’s Dispatches from Palestine offers a home for such reflections. “Our poets, storytellers, essayists, translators, and artists . . . not only reflect our age, they respond.”