Art by Jin Suk
The Launch of AGNI 98
Join us for the IN-PERSON launch of the new fall issue!
Wednesday, November 15th, 2023, at 7:00 p.m. EST
Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, 949 Commonwealth Ave., Boston
Register at Eventbrite to receive reminders!
AGNI celebrates its NINETY-EIGHTH issue with readings by
- Jennifer Haigh: Celebrated fiction writer and author of seven books, most recently Mercy Street, named a Best Book of 2022 by The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe.
- Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez: Chilean poet, novelist, translator, and text-based artist whose hybrid piece “Metrical Charm: For an Abortion” appeared in AGNI’s spring issue.
- D. Nurkse: Longtime AGNI poet considered “a master of lyric mode” (Ilya Kaminsky), author of twelve collections of poetry, including A Country of Strangers (Knopf, 2022), a “new and selected.”
- Mary O’Donoghue: AGNI’s senior fiction editor and the 2023 Heimbold Chair of Irish Studies at Villanova University, author of the new story collection The Hour After Happy Hour (The Stinging Fly Press, Dublin).
The evening will also feature an interlude of live folk music by Boston-area vocalist and bassist Hazel Royer and guitarist Ira Klein.
Our release party follows.
The fall issue includes fiction by Lucy Sweeney Byrne, Mylene Fernández Pintado (in Dick Cluster’s translation), and Subraj Singh; nonfiction by Peter Balakian, Mara Naselli, and Emmanuel Iduma; poems by Sharon Olds, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Denise Duhamel, Leila Chatti, and jason b. crawford; hybrid work by Sabrina Fountain; and much more. Cover artist Eva Lundsager sets the tone, finding motion in landscapes at the edge.
More on the readers and musicians appearing at the November 15th launch:
Jennifer Haigh is the author of the story collection News From Heaven and six critically acclaimed novels, most recently Mercy Street, named a Best Book of 2022 by The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe. Published in eighteen languages, her books have won* *the Bridge Prize, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Massachusetts Book Award, the PEN New England Award in Fiction, and a literature award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her stories have been published widely, including in Granta, The Atlantic, and The Best American Short Stories. A Guggenheim fellow, she teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at Boston University. Her novel Swan will be published in 2025.
Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez, a Chilean poet, novelist, and translator, is the author of the poetry chapbook A/An, forthcoming from End of the Line Press, and the novel La Pava, published by the Chilean press Ediciones Inubicalistas. They teach creative writing at Clark University.
D. Nurkse is the author of twelve books, including A Country of Strangers (Alfred A. Knopf, 2020), a “new and selected,” and Love in the Last Days (Knopf, 2017).
Mary O’Donoghue, an Irish writer living in Boston and Tuscaloosa, Alabama, is senior fiction editor of AGNI. Her story collection, The Hour After Happy Hour, was released by The Stinging Fly Press this year. She has published poetry collections with Salmon Poetry and Dedalus Press, and her translations of Irish-language poetry appear in volumes from Cló Iar-Chonnacht, Bloodaxe Books, and Yale University Press. Her novel, Before the House Burns, was published by Lilliput Press in 2010. She is professor of English at Babson College in Massachusetts. In 2023 she held the Heimbold Chair of Irish Studies at Villanova University.
Hazel Royer and Ira Klein perform original music and innovative arrangements of traditional American folk songs. They first met in 2018 while studying at Berklee College of Music and have performed extensively in the Boston area, including at The Red Room, Atwood’s Tavern, Longfellow House Museum, Mount Auburn Cemetery, and Club Passim. Their first full-length album, Say Darling Say, featuring guitarist Kevin Barry, will be released through the Boston folk label Nine Athens Music in early 2024.
credit: Toan Trinh
Free and open to the public! Contact us for accessibility or other questions.
Wednesday, November 15th, 2023, at 7:00 p.m. EST
IN-PERSON
Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, 949 Commonwealth Ave, Boston, MA 02215
This event will be live-streamed. Contact us to receive a link.
By the AGNI staff.