MFA Alum Jessica Hagy publishes 3 books

The pandemic has been a busy time for prolific MFA alum Jessica Hagy (MFA 2018), who has seen 3 volumes come out in the last two years.

In 2020, Tartarus Press published One Morning, a gothic novel Hagy wrote as her MFA thesis. One Morning tells the story of twelve hours in Gour Borough, Pennsylvania through the interwoven perspectives of twelve women who live there, their fates soaked in—and stained by—the polluted waters of the long-abandoned coal mines that crumble below their town. Hagy is currently recording the audiobook, which will be released later this year.

2020 also saw the publication of Hagy’s The Humanist’s Devotional, a book of daily meditations centered on humanism as a function of learned history and a coping mechanism for a hectic and unnerving world. In it, Hagy collects and connects aphorisms by some of history’s great thinkers, using them to generate mantras that arise from their intersections.

Hagy continues her diagrammatic explorations in How to be Fearless (Sasquatch Books, 2021), a cheeky self-help book told entirely through infographics, charts, and short, inspiring messages. Look for her next volume, Aetui: Pentagram Poems, this spring from Inside the Castle, and keep up with her webcomic Indexed, illustrated entirely on index cards.