David Wojahn's eighth collection of verse, World Tree, was published last year by Pittsburgh. His previous collection, Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems, 1982–2004 (Pitt), was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won the Folger Shakespeare Library’s O. B. Hardison Award. Among his numerous awards and honors are an Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship, residencies from the Yaddo and McDowell colonies, three Pushcart Prizes, and fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Illinois Arts Council. He teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University and in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
AGNI was founded in 1972 at Antioch College by undergraduate Askold Melnyczuk, a then-aspiring (now accomplished) writer with his own vision of a vehicle for alternative news, visual arts, and literature. Melnyczuk was interested in creating a magazine that would feature a new generation of writers and visual artists.
We see literature and the arts as part of a broad, ongoing cultural conversation that every society needs to remain vibrant and alive. Literature for literature’s sake is not what AGNI is about. 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.
"It's tough, it dances, it's 'top of the world' —
read AGNI,
A star among its peers, like Jimmy Cagney."
—Robert Pinsky
"Essential"
—The Boston Globe
"In its artistic integrity and social concern [AGNI] is... flat-out amazing."
—Literary Magazine Review
Issue 76
