AGNI has a history of assembling portfolios that bring attention to rich and often underappreciated categories of writing. Associate poetry editor Esteban Rodriguez, guest editor Jennifer De Leon, and assistant fiction editor Ben Black are coediting the latest of these: “To Never Have Risked Our Lives”: An AGNI Portfolio of Central American and Mexican Diaspora Writing.
This portfolio gathers Central American and Mexican poets and writers, as well as descendants who identify as such, who seek to document a shared existence that transcends geographic, physical, and spiritual borders. Historic and current patterns of Central American and Mexican immigration to other countries, including the United States, are often prompted by economic uncertainty, climate change, social unrest, governmental instability, and the goal of reunification with close and distant family members. This portfolio will seek work that addresses migration, diaspora, identity, and how one comes to terms with traumas, triumphs, and uncertainties. In addition to fiction, poetry, essays, and hybrid pieces written in English, we welcome translations, including from indigenous languages and from earlier writers who, in the words of Salvadoran poet Javier Zamora, “Make it easier / to never have to risk our lives.”
See guidelines.
AGNI is a literary magazine housed at Boston University and known “among readers around the world,” as the writers group PEN put it, “for publishing important new writers early in their careers, many of them translated into English for the first time.”
The print magazine appears twice yearly, in late April and late October. A very small portion of each is reprinted on this site, but you’ll also find a trove of writing published exclusively online, including categories like reviews and interviews that we tend not to feature in “the print.”