AGNI

Fiction, essays, interviews, reviews & poetry
bu.edu/agni

"We see literature and the arts as part of a broad, ongoing cultural conversation that every society needs to remain vibrant and alive. Our writers and artists hold a mirror up to nature, mankind, the world; they courageously reflect their age, for better or worse; and their work provokes perceptions and thoughts that help us understand and respond to our age. Literature for literature’s sake is not what AGNI is about.

Aside from regular inclusion of its work in the annual Best American, O. Henry Prize, and Pushcart Prize anthologies, “[a]mong readers around the world, AGNI is known for publishing important new writers early in their careers,” as PEN American Center put it in 2001. Such authors include Jhumpa Lahiri (Pulitzer Prize, 2000, for Interpreter of Maladies; the title story appeared in AGNI 47 in 1998), Ha Jin (National Book Award, 1999; many of his early poems and stories appeared in AGNI and he was a Featured Poet in 1989), and Susanna Kaysen (Girl, Interrupted, first excerpted in AGNI in 1991), as well as Mark Doty, Glyn Maxwell, Sven Birkerts, and Olena Kalytiak Davis, whom we’ve printed alongside such luminaries as Seamus Heaney, Joyce Carol Oates, Derek Walcott, and many others.

AGNI has published more than seventy-nine issues in a history touching five decades. The magazine is one of the strongest voices of one of the most active writing communities in America, and we continue to focus on developing audiences for contemporary literature.

Each issue includes at least forty writers/artists, with our print run now at 3,000. AGNI has paying subscribers in thirty-eight states and ten countries, is carried by over one hundred university and city libraries, and is distributed to independent and chain bookstores nationwide.”