The Launch of AGNI 104

The evening, hosted by Brookline Booksmith, will feature readings by Ibtisam Azem, John Cotter, Shangyang Fang, and Tracy K. Smith—and a live musical performance by Naomi Westwater. A release party will follow.

More on the featured readers & performers:

Ibtisam Azem is a Palestinian novelist and journalist based in New York, the author of a story collection and two novels in Arabic. Her novels have been published, in Sinan Antoon’s English translations, as The Book of Disappearance (Syracuse University Press, 2019), longlisted for the International Booker Prize, and The Sleep Thief (And Other Stories, 2026). “Aida,” in this issue, is part of her forthcoming collection, City of Strangers (And Other Stories, 2027). She is a Radcliffe Fellow for 2026–27.

John Cotter is the author of Losing Music: A Memoir of Art, Pain, and Transformation (Milkweed, 2023), winner of the Colorado Book Award, and the novella Under the Small Lights (Miami University Press, 2010). His essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, AGNI, Guernica, Epoch, and The Georgia Review; and his fiction in Prairie Schooner, New England Review, Copper Nickel, and Joyland. He lives in Providence.

Shangyang Fang is a poet, translator, and academic from Chengdu, China. He writes poetry in English and Chinese. He is the author of two collections of original poetry, Burying the Mountain (2021) and Bastard of Elsewhere (2027), and a book of translation from the Chinese, Study of Sorrow (2025), all published by Copper Canyon Press. He is assistant professor of English at Wesleyan University.

Tracy K. Smith is the author of five poetry collections, all from Graywolf Press, including Such Color: New and Selected Poems (2021), which won the New England Book Award; Wade in the Water (2019), which won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; and Life on Mars (2011), which won the Pulitzer Prize. Her nonfiction books include Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times (W. W. Norton & Co., 2025); To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul (Alfred A. Knopf, 2023); and Ordinary Light (Knopf, 2015), a finalist for the National Book Award. She is cotranslator, with Changtai Bi, of My Name Will Grow Wide like a Tree: Selected Poems of Yi Lei (Graywolf, 2020), a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize; and coeditor, with John Freeman, of There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis (Vintage Books, 2021). Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Harold Washington Literary Award, and the Academy Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets. From 2017 to 2019 she served as the twenty-second poet laureate of the United States. She is the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University and a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

Naomi Westwater (they/them/she) is a Black, queer singer-songwriter from Massachusetts, whose work combines folk-rock music, poetry, and spirituality. They are a part of Club Passim’s Folk Collective, where they produce Re-Imagining Lilith Fair: a tribute to the feminist music scene of the 1990s with an intersectional lens for today. Naomi has been nominated for five Boston Music Awards, and has been featured in The Boston Globe, Under The Radar, WBUR, GBH, and The Bluegrass Situation. Her latest concept record, Cycle & Change, is out everywhere.