The Launch of AGNI 102

We celebrate the release of AGNI 102 with readings by Mary Cappello, Askold Melnyczuk, Hera Naguib, and Gish Jen. With a live musical performance by Javier Jeffer y su Conjunto Obaye. Reception to follow.

More on the featured readers & performers:

Mary Cappello is a queer practitioner of the essay who experiments in prose, memoir, literary nonfiction, and performative criticism. Her seven books include a detour on awkwardness, a breast cancer anti-chronicle, a lyric biography, and the mood fantasia Life Breaks In (University of Chicago Press, 2016). Her most recent book, Lecture, a speculative manifesto on the lost arts of the lecture, the notebook, and the nap, inaugurated Transit Books’s Undelivered Lecture Series. A former Guggenheim and Berlin Prize Fellow, she is professor emerita of English and creative writing at the University of Rhode Island.

Askold Melnyczuk—the founding editor of AGNI, awarded the PEN/Nora Magid Award for Magazine Editing—is the author of four novels and a book of stories. What Is Told (Faber, 1994) was the first commercially published work of fiction in English to highlight the Ukrainian refugee experience and was named a New York Times Notable. Other novels have been selected as a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year and an Editor’s Choice by the American Library Association’s Booklist. His selected poems, The Venus of Odesa, was published by MadHat Press this summer. A book of selected nonfiction, With Madonna in Kyiv: Why Literature Still Matters (More than Ever), will be published by Harvard University Press in 2026. He has edited a book of essays on the St. Lucian Nobel laureate Derek Walcott and is coeditor of From Three Worlds, an anthology of Ukrainian writers from the 1980s generation. He’s the recipient of a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers Award for fiction, the Heldt Prize for translation, and the George Garret Award from AWP for his work in the literary community. Individual poems, stories, essays, and translations have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. Also the founder of Arrowsmith Press, he has taught at Boston University, Harvard, and Bennington College and currently teaches at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Hera Naguib’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Iowa Review, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poetry Northwest, Poem-a-Day, New England Review, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. She has received the John Mackay Shaw Award from the Academy of American Poets and the Quarterly West Poetry Prize, selected by Sally Wen Mao. A former Fulbright Scholar and a recipient of the VIDA Residency Fellowship, Hera’s work has received support from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Vermont Studio Center, and the Writers Room of Boston. She teaches at Emerson College.

Gish Jen is the author of six novels, two book of stories, and two works of nonfiction. Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the Fulbright Foundation, as well as the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction and the Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her stories have been chosen for The Best American Short Stories five times, including The Best American Short Stories of the Century. She and her husband split their time between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Vermont. Her latest novel is Bad Bad Girl.

Javier Jeffer y su Conjunto Obaye. Born in Havana, Javier Jeffer Cumbrera joined Cuba’s National Arts School at the age of ten, where he earned recognition in international competitions as both a dancer and choreographer. After graduating, he joined Cuba’s National Company—Danza Contemporánea de Cuba—where he performed in major works and received the honorary titles of Primer Bailarín and Maestro. Specializing in Afro-Cuban folkloric music, he became a founding member of the Madreagua Musical Theater Company, choreographing their shows, performing as a soloist in their productions, and contributing to their album with top Cuban artists. In 2025, he was granted a special artist visa for a one-year residency with the MetaMovements Artist Collective, based in Cambridge. Conjunto Obaye is a vibrant ensemble that brings together professional musicians and motivated students. The way they unite—blending experience, passion, and fresh energy—reflects not only the depth of Cuban traditions, but also the joy of learning and creating music in community.

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