AGNI 82 Release Party, Boston Playwright’s Theatre, October 20th, 7:30

Tuesday, October 20, 2015, at 7:00 p.m.

Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, 949 Commonwealth Ave, Boston (Green Line B, Pleasant St.)

AGNI celebrates its EIGHTY-SECOND issue with readings by:

• Gjertrud Schnackenberg: Winner of the Rome Prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters; author of six poetry collections, including most recently Heavenly Questions.
• Sándor Jászberényi: Hungarian fiction writer and war correspondent, here from his home in Cairo; author of the story collection The Devil Is a Black Dog.
• Richard Hoffman: Author of the acclaimed memoir Half the House, just reissued in a twentieth-anniversary edition; poet, fiction writer, and former chair of PEN New England.
• Nicole Terez Dutton: Author of the collection If One of Us Should Fall, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and the inaugural poet laureate of Somerville.

And a NEW FEATURE: AGNI welcomes a surprise musical guest!

The fall issue brings you stories by Malerie Willens, Ihab Hassan, and Colin Fleming; poems by Kathleen Graber, Julia Hartwig, and Bob Hicok; essays by Andrea Barrett and Susan McCallum-Smith; an abstract comic by Rosaire Appel; and much more.

Gjertrud Schnackenberg is the author of Supernatural Love: Poems 1973–1992; the book-length poem The Throne of Labdacus (2000), named a New York Times Book Review Notable Book and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry; and her sixth collection, Heavenly Questions (2011), which won the Griffin International Poetry Prize. She has also been awarded the Rome Prize of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Gjertrud Schnackenberg was born in 1953 in Tacoma, Washington. She began writing poetry as a student at Mount Holyoke College and as an undergraduate earned a reputation as a poetic prodigy, twice winning the Glascock Award for Poetry. Her first two books of poetry, Portraits and Elegies (1982) and The Lamplit Answer (1985), established her as one of the strongest of the New Formalists and confirmed her early promise. Reviewing The Lamplit Answer, Rosetta Cohen noted Schnackenberg’s “talent for creating small, intricate worlds [which] seems to place Schnakenberg within a tradition that has less to do with a particular poetic mode than it does with the nineteenth-century novel.” Schnackenberg’s third book, A Gilded Lapse of Time (1992), revealed the influence of Eliot, Yeats, Auden, and Lowell. The poems demonstrated mastery of dense rhymed and metered lines on subjects ranging from classical philosophy to Christian theology and Russian poetry.

In 2000, Schnackenberg’s selected poems Supernatural Love: Poems 1973–1992 was released. The book-length poem The Throne of Labdacus (2000), a retelling of the Oedipus myth from the points of view of Apollo and a slave, was published simultaneously. It was named a New York Times Book Review Notable Book and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. Schnakenberg’s sixth collection, Heavenly Questions (2011) won the Griffin International Poetry Prize. Comprised of six long poems written in rhyming iambic pentameter, the book oscillates between lyric and epic modes.

Schnackenberg’s many honors and awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute. She is the recipient of the Rome Prize of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has been a Visiting Scholar at the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and Humanities and a Christensen Visiting Fellow at St. Catherine’s College in Oxford. Schnackenberg married Robert Nozick, a Harvard philosophy professor, in 1987; he passed away in 2002. She has lived in Italy, Tacoma, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, and currently resides in Boston.

Sándor Jászberényi is a writer and Middle East correspondent who has covered the Darfur crisis, the revolutions in Egypt and Libya, the Gaza War, and the Huthi uprising in Yemen. His first collection of stories, The Devil Is a Black Dog, was published in late 2013 in Hungary and Italy. Born in Hungary, he now lives in Cairo, working as a correspondent for Egypt Independent and Hungarian newspapers.

Richard Hoffman is the author, most recently, of the memoir Love & Fury, finalist for the New England Book Award from the New England Independent Booksellers Association; also Half the House: a Memoir, just reissued in a twentieth-anniversary edition; the poetry collections Without Paradise, Gold Star Road, and Emblem; and a collection of short fiction, Interference & Other Stories. A past chair of PEN New England, he is senior writer in residence at Emerson College.

Nicole Terez Dutton’s work has appeared in Callaloo, 32 Poems, Salt Hill Journal, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the Frost Place, the Fine Arts Work Center, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her collection of poems, If One Of Us Should Fall, was selected as the winner of the 2011 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. She lives in Somerville, where she serves as the city’s inaugural poet laureate, and teaches in the Solstice Low-Residency MFA Program.

Free and open to the public. For further information contact AGNI Senior Editor William Pierce at agni@bu.edu or (617) 353-7135 or visit AGNI Online at www.agnimagazine.org.