Askold Melnyczuk
Askold Melnyczuk is founding editor of AGNI and contributes a series of essays called “Shadowboxing.” He is professor of creative writing at The University
of Massachusetts-Boston and a member of the core fiction faculty of the graduate Bennington Writing Seminars. His third novel, The House of Widows (Graywolf Press), won the Editor’s Choice Award from the American Library Association as one of the outstanding books of 2008. His second novel, Ambassador
of the Dead (Counterpoint, 2001) was
called “exquisite, original” by The Washington Post, and his first, What Is Told (Faber and Faber), was a New
York Times Notable Book for 1994.
In 1997 he received a Lila Wallace-Readers’ Digest Award in Fiction. Winner of the McGinnis Award in Fiction, he has also been awarded grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. He has published stories, poems, translations, and reviews in The New York Times, The Nation, The Partisan Review, Grand Street, Ploughshares, Poetry, and The Boston Globe. His poems have been included in various anthologies, including The McGraw-Hill Book of Poetry, Literature: The Evolving Canon, and Under 35: The New Generation of American Poets. He has edited three volumes in the Graywolf Take Three Poetry Series, as well as a volume of tributes to Father Daniel Berrigan and a livre d’artiste on painter Gerry Bergstein. He also coedited From Three Worlds: New Writing from Ukraine.
He previously taught at Harvard University and Boston University, where he edited AGNI until its thirtieth anniversary year in 2002. A research associate of the Ukrainian Institute at Harvard, he has served on the boards of the New England Poetry Club and PEN–New England and has been a fellow of the Boston Foundation. In 2001 he received PEN American Center’s biennial Nora Magid Award for Magazine Editing as well as PEN-New England’s “Friend to Writers” Award.
Melnyczuk founded AGNI in 1972 as an undergraduate at Antioch College. (updated 10/2008)
AGNI has published the following work by Askold Melnyczuk:
| •AGNI at Twenty-Five |  |
| •Ed Hogan: In Memoriam |  |
| •Editor’s Note |  |
| •The Great Acorn of Light |  |
| •The Hammer on the Table |  |
| •In Memoriam Michael Mazur, 1935-2009 |  |
| •In Memorium: Solomea Pavlychko |  |
| •Introduction |  |
| •Introduction to This Issue’s Poetry |  |
| •James Laughlin, Poet |  |
| •Never the Kind |  |
| •Putting Down the Gloves, Leaving the Whispering Gallery |  |
| •Reply to Birkerts |  |
| •Roman Coins, Scythian Pottery | |
| •Shadowboxing: A Column |  |
| •Shadowboxing: Able Was I Ere I Was Cain |  |
| •Shadowboxing: An Open Letter to My Students About Captain Violin, Saul Bellow, the War, and the Art of Fiction |  |
| •Shadowboxing: Ball’s Bearings and Monster from the Midlands |  |
| •Shadowboxing: Daytripping Chatila |  |
| •Shadowboxing: For the Iraqi Dead |  |
| •Shadowboxing: From the Diary of a Self-hating Pundit |  |
| •Shadowboxing: Gentlemen’s Disagreements |  |
| •Shadowboxing: On Not Being Irish in Boston |  |
| •Shadowboxing: On the Failures of Victory |  |
| •Shadowboxing: Prophet Loss |  |
| •Shadowboxing: Putting Down the Gloves, Leaving the Whispering Gallery | |
| •Shadowboxing: Saved by Shame: Milosz’s Concupiscent Curds |  |
| •Shadowboxing: Secular Antics in Bethlehem |  |
| •Shadowboxing: Style and Time |  |
| •Shadowboxing: The Evil of Banality |  |
| •Shadowboxing: The Future of Fiction: Toward a New Internationalism | |
| •Shadowboxing: The Future of Literature in America |  |
| •Shadowboxing: with Alan Greenspan | |
| •To Tease a Shadow: In Memoriam, JB |  |
| •Where Is My Lariat?: The Poetry of John McKernan |  |
AGNI has published the following translations by Askold Melnyczuk:
| •from Prayers (1) by Bohdan Boychuk (translated with the author) | |
| •The King of Tasmania by Mykola Rudenko | |