Art by Jin Suk
Keeping AGNI Whole
It’s the common refrain right now, unfortunately: We’ve lost our Federal support. It’s true of so many who were working toward a stable new life in this country; it’s true of many who were fighting disease and food insecurity both here and abroad; it’s true of nearly everyone who proved the value of their work in civil rights or climate change to government agencies that once proudly supported them. It’s true of AGNI now as well.
It happened in the way we’ve come to expect this year: on a Friday night, after the week’s news cycle went quiet.
In light of everything else, AGNI should not be your first priority. AGNI is not our very first priority. But we know you hold an important place open for the arts, for the written word especially. So we ask you now to keep AGNI close and lend support.
With coordination from Americans for the Arts, LitNet, and the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses—and instrumental help from our parent organization, Boston University—we are appealing NEA’s decision to truncate this year’s grant period. But without your help, we will not be able to make up for the inevitable loss of ongoing Federal funding.
Our diverse masthead includes more than twenty writer-editors, spread across fourteen states from Hawaii to Florida, Oregon to Massachusetts. We believe fiercely in this work we do together. Editing is a calling. And the results show in the notice people take. Just in this recent period, writing that first appeared in AGNI has been cited or reprinted in The Best American Essays, Best New Translations, and Best Debut Short Stories. Work from AGNI has also recently been featured in Literary Hub and received a Pushcart Prize as well as a PEN/Dau Prize.
On Monday, two more AGNI writers—Marie Howe and Mosab Abu Toha—were awarded Pulitzer Prizes.
This matters. Not the awards—we can point to dozens of pieces in the latest issues that are just as powerful and “important” as those that have been deservedly celebrated. But these honors testify to the value of the endeavor, the ethos that AGNI represents, underwrites, and fosters. Works of the imagination are a common good—and they’re also a personal bolster and solace. AGNI poet and Advisory Board member Robert Pinsky is justly cheered for his Favorite Poem Project, which invites the widest possible range of people to share their engagement with words. AGNI, too, has reading at its heart. As coeditor Sven Birkerts has written in his books, absorption in reading fosters the development of a more dimensional inner life while giving access to experiences far beyond just our own.
What AGNI does—beneath the notice of those bearing sledgehammers—is maintain an arena for the flourishing of both the emerging writer and the searching reader, a meeting place where restless readers, tired of the sameness seen in so much trade publishing, can discover actively committed writers—those who access their deepest ingenuity to convey what they find in themselves and in the world, without leaning back on cliché. Freshness of encounter: that’s what characterizes the work in our pages.
And it’s what we ask you to stand with today by donating.
The Editors
By the AGNI staff.