AGNI (magazine)

AGNI is an American literary magazine that publishes poetry, fiction, essays, reviews, interviews, and artwork twice a year in print and biweekly online from its home at Boston University. Its editor is Sven Birkerts, the literary critic and essayist; its senior editor is William Pierce.

AGNI was founded in 1972 at Antioch College by former undergraduate Askold Melnyczuk. After a brief residency in New Jersey, AGNI moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Sharon Dunn joined Melnyczuk as co-editor in 1977. From 1980 to 1987 Dunn was the magazine's editor, first in Cambridge, then for three years in Western Massachusetts. In fall of 1987 Melnyczuk resumed editorship, and AGNI relocated to Boston University, later moving into the former offices of The Partisan Review on 236 Bay State Road. In July 2002 Sven Birkerts assumed the editorship. The magazine receives support from the Boston University College of Arts and Sciences graduate program in Creative Writing. In addition, AGNI relies on funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and individual donors.

AGNI publishes two 240-page print issues annually. Each issue includes thirty to forty contributors, with a minimum print run of 3,000. AGNI has subscribers across the United States and in several other countries. It is also carried by university and public libraries, and is distributed to independent and chain bookstores within the United States. AGNI Online, an electronic extension of the print magazine, features biweekly postings of new Web-only fiction, poetry, essays, and interviews. Both print and online issues include work from multiple languages. Translations from Urdu, Dutch, German, Spanish, Hungarian, Ukrainian, Yiddish, Chinese, Turkish, Hebrew, Italian, Slovenian, Polish, French, and Latvian have been published in AGNI.

According to the magazine’s website, “Literature for literature’s sake is not what AGNI is about. Rather, we see literature and the arts as part of a broad, ongoing cultural conversation that every society needs to remain vibrant and alive.”